I spent childhood weekends bored in the aisles of the Village Discount outlet while my mom shopped racks of cluttered clothing. Just wait, she’d say if I complained; When you’re older, you and your friends will love shopping here. Her prophecy came true. And early last year, it was on a chaotic Village Discount Outlet bookshelf that I found Laurie Stone’s 2017 collection My Life as an Animal. I bought the book because of its fur cover. It sat in my to-be-read stack for weeks.

March hit. The news started developing by the minute, reversing by the hour. I’d open a book to find that my brain was unable to string sentences together or to care about what those sentences meant. My Life as an Animal was the first book to break that curse. But the ability to read again was a feat—so, naturally, it came with a snag. The experience of encountering a deeply problematic remark three-quarters of the way through a book I otherwise loved brought on a near-physical reaction. 

Before that happened, I was reading the kind of book that makes you feel like you’ve entered someone else’s consciousness. It seemed to me that a thrift store had been the narratively-right locale in which to come across Stone’s work. Launching this collection is a story called “Yard Sale,” a piece that sees a character self-referentially named Laurie darting between scenes from Arizona, New York, an artists’ colony, a hospital bed, a series of conversations with friends and strangers, and—of course—yard sales. The unspoken vow “Yard Sale” makes is that the rest of the collection will embody the ethos of thrifters, drifters, those of us with blistered feet. 

“Yard Sale” ends with Richard, the narrator’s partner, saying: 

“This story is a jumble of impressions. You need a plot.’ I say, ‘What if the story is about a woman who is furnishing a house in order to see if it can be a home and in the process realizes she is not capable of feeling settled?’”

This passage is Stone’s way of showing readers devoted to Aristotelian plot or Freytag’s pyramid the door. By questioning the bounds of narrative in the first story, Stone positions her collection as one that will push the limit of the short story’s form. These stories seek resolution, yet they run from it.

The twinning real-life naming of characters and details of a writing life encourages us to read My Life as an Animal as autofiction. On writing autofiction, Stone says: “I want to say something about the differences between the narrator of the stories and me. I have created her. Me, I have less control over.” Does autofiction invite a different reading experience? At the very least, the genres in which we place these blended books changes how we read them. For example, both Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings and Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman’s Big Friendship meld the personal with sociology, history, poetry, philosophy, and nonfiction. My Life as an Animal places Stone at the intersection between fiction, non-fiction, and literary studies. Contemporary writing over the last several years has increasingly bent toward hybrid forms, altering the expectations for how writing can find shape and structure. 

Critics are quick to call autofiction plotless, perhaps not considering that the genre simply has a different method of storytelling. Here, it’s useful to step back and look at where the term “autofiction” comes from. It first appeared in a blurb on the French novel Fils by Serge Doubrovsky that says:

“Autobiography? No, that is a privilege reserved for the important people of this world, at the end of their lives, in a refined style. Fiction, of events and facts strictly real; autofiction, if you will, to have entrusted the language of an adventure to the adventure of language, outside of the wisdom and the syntax of the novel, traditional or new.” 

By stating that autobiography is for “the important people of this world,” autofiction rejects a certain life story: the hero’s journey. Instead of a neat shaping of narrative perfectly suited to dominant cultural ideals of success—i.e.: rags to riches—autofiction calls for a different kind of story to be told. Stone’s stories are the sidelong sort. In her collection, layering as a narrative device is key to the tessellations that connect these stories together. Milestones are mixed with the mundane: aging, a dead mother’s stolen ring, Jewish identity, and dreams make repeat appearances. Laurie is not set out on a clear goal of advancement. The stories are driven by something else, of which persona plays a large part. 

Take “I Like Talking to You,” a story in which Stone writes of a friend caught in a doomed affair: “When she looks back on her life, she wants the memory to go through her like an ax. What does anyone want to remember but the times we were out of control?” These are the kinds of sentences I search for when I read. This is autofiction “entrusting the language of an adventure to the adventure of language.” Stone presses this point by saying that her autofictive characters are “more generous, more loving, more curious, less judgmental, funnier, and probably sexier than I am because she needs to seduce the reader to the next sentence.” Seduction by means of personality is the engine that drives readers forward. 

Now we’ve arrived at the dirt. The story “When People Fall, I Laugh” is modeled after the work of Edouard Leve, a renowned practitioner of autofiction. Like Chelsea Hodson’s I Could Live Without Speaking—a riff on Leve’s Autoportrait—Stone uses Leve’s associative sentence structure as a prompt for her own Autoportrait homage. It was in this story that a sentence made me write ohhh nooo in the margins. The sentence: “I think women who live in secular countries and conform to religious dress codes make the lives of all women less free and less safe.”

My first instinct was to let it slide, but my mind came back to it. How willing should a reader be to ignore a bigoted take in a piece of fiction that they otherwise love completely? 

The counterpoint to Laurie’s jarring, narrow take on what constitutes “freedom” is that not only does every woman have the right to decide for herself how to dress in accordance with her beliefs, but as Dalia Mogahed said:

“The irony in all of this is that Islam’s alleged outdated views of women is the most salient anti-Muslim stereotype among the general public. It’s more prevalent than any other negative stereotype about Muslims. So, you have this situation where people’s supposed ‘concern for Muslim women’ and their treatment fuels a bigotry against the community that results in Muslim women being targeted by hate.”

Does a writer need to publicly address every cultural miscalculation in the vein of an after-school special? On the other hand, if they don’t address their missteps and oversights, are they perpetuating harmful beliefs? Conveniently, there’s an interview where Stone says: “I allow myself to be wrong, and if I have been hurtful, I apologize.” Later on in the interview, she elaborates on the dissonance of writing autofiction:

“The voice in my writing is not my actual voice. My actual voice wants attention and affirmation. The voice I’ve invented operates on three principles: don’t apologize, don’t translate yourself, and don’t ask for love. I would add a fourth: don’t need the reader to take your side (another version of not asking for love, I can see). I think this is important at the moment with so many people expecting a right-think and group-think mentality from you—or else cancellation.” 

Stone leaves space between the autos and the fiction, one that does not name as a consequence of fucking up publicly the knee-jerk reaction of cancellation.

Laurie’s own problematic comment loops to the story “Toby Dead” which focuses on Laurie’s relationship with her mother, Toby. Toby is intractable and she is a mirror to Laurie. At one point, Laurie goes with Toby to her volunteering post at God’s Love We Deliver. There, Laurie is pulled aside by the head chef who asks for her help. Toby has been making racist remarks on the job, and the chef hopes Laurie can get through to her. Laurie tries to talk to her mother by saying: “‘Just stop being nasty. How hard is that?’” But once the words come out of her mouth, Laurie realizes that she asks herself the same question daily. “Mornings I wake up with lists of friends I’ve offended,” she admits to no one. 

From the scenario of Laurie and her mother, a set of parallel lines could be drawn between the reader and Stone’s autofictional character. When Laurie the character is faced by her mother’s racism, readers experience the scene one degree removed. Laurie serves as a foil for Toby's opinions. When the words are from Laurie, the situation is far less comfortable for the readers. This is the person whose thoughts I was so seduced by? 

In fiction, the best characters are fucked-up and flawed. Just look at the title of the story “When People Fall, I Laugh”. It’s a cheeky admittance, and it frames Laurie as an enchanting imp, but the character presented proves to be self-conscious without self-awareness. There’s part of me that wonders if panning in on this one point might be excessive. The result of spending too much time on the internet, where anything short of model goodness will be held against you. 

Held against is not the same as held accountable, but contemporary cancel culture seeks to show what’s intolerable and minimize harms through hostility. It’s a terrible approach, but when there are real structural oppressions and every day racist attacks on individual people, it can feel necessary to draw distinct lines against what is intolerable. Bad takes range from dumb to dangerous on an imprecise scale of taboo. An ill-thought-out comment like Laurie’s is a far cry from a racist insurrection at the capital, but our ears are perked. The acoustics in this guarded place cause a flutter echo. 

“The character is entitled to her own bad opinion,” my friend M said when I asked him what he thought. For Stone—or at least for the autofictive version of her that appears throughout these stories—her glinting prejudice is thrown in there as easily as one of her glimmering jokes. Throughout these stories, the writing is funny, devastating, funny again—but the second time around, there’s a stitch in your side. And the stitch is a knife.

Laurel Shimasaki lives in New Orleans. Her work appears in Catapult, Salon, Hobart, New Delta Review, and elsewhere.