On Blackouts and Autofic

I recently finished Blackouts, the second novel by Justin Torres, and wow what a read. His first book We the Animals was a big inspiration for me back when I first read it and continues to be one of my favorite books I’ve ever read.

There’s a lot I could say about Blackouts. It follows the plot of a man who visits the mysterious Palace in the desert to share in the last moments of his friends life. What unfolds is a mashup of autobiographical fiction, historical narrative, and ingenious dialogues on storytelling and memory. Woven throughout the story is the fictionalized history of Jan Gay a pseudonym for a real-life queer writer and sex researcher responsible for helping create the, again very real book, Sex: Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. Juan, the older dying man’s project involves this book and the fruits of his labor are placed throughout the book: a series of recreated blackout poems or stories made from the pages of Sex Variants.

It’s a story about a lot of things: queer erasure, friendship, legacy, sex, love, identity, and of course storytelling as the two friends pop in and out of different forms of storytelling throughout the novel. A particularly good example of this comes at the end as the two of them recreate the stories of their past, told through the lens of a film script—a motif that is dropped and picked back up in a playful spirit despite the dire circumstances.

At the end of the book, Torres has a postface where he1 talks about his work’s semi-autobiographical manner.

Autobiographical fiction, or autofic as it’s been shortened to in the modern era, is something I continue to struggle with. It’s no secret to anyone who reads what I write that I’m practicing at least some form of autobiographical writing. As my brother likes to quote every single time he reads something I wrote: “The characters are all fictional,” a reference to Jack from Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited who is consistently claiming to his skeptical audience that his fictional characters are not based on them.

I’ve never read Gorilla My Love, but of course, the point of her quote is that when you write autobiographical fiction someone will always come at you with the thought that everything you write is a 1:1. Torres, whose novels both deal with some form of the autobiographical experience mocks it playfully here, saying there’s no use in trying to avoid it—we write what we’re compelled to write, even if we know we shouldn’t. At least, that’s what I take from it.

There’s a compelling argument here, for me at least. I’ve always contended that the point of autofic is not to craft some overarching argument for why X person was bad or Y event in history is meaningful, but rather that, even if we refuse to accept it, we write about what we know. So why hide the origin points?

Of course, the problem with this then becomes that people (usually your twin brother) come at you with the classic wink wink nudge nudge, “you must be secretly writing about [insert person here]. This isn’t true, you’re simply borrowing from your past history the rich and complex detail of having loved two men who both prefer washing dishes in rubber gloves to build tension in your story.

I’m not certain I fully understand Torres’ beliefs on history and fiction and how they intersect. I think in Blackouts he’s arguing for a more nuanced view of what history is, expanding on very real facts of queer history to point out that, given the erasure (blackouts) of queer history so much about the pioneers is left unknown. It’s up to us, or what’s left of us to tell the full story, even if that means recreating our own from the vestiges of their clinical texts.

On a personal level, I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do, albeit at a less grand scale. I’m interested in the end of things and the sort of fictional stories that inhabit them. But I’m also interested in the fictional stories that inhabit a relationship: the false narratives we tell ourselves before, during, and after. To fall out of love with someone can wound you just the same as loving someone, and, once that person is gone completely their legacy still lingers in you.

But a lot of people are eager for autofic for the wrong reasons. Mostly, I think it stems from a need to immediately understand the thing they’re reading rather than engage with it, and parse its meaning on its own terms. I’m guilty of this too, especially when I was young and dumb and in college thinking that everything must have a queer subtext and mean the author is gay. People, naturally, want to feel as if they can understand something or as if they’ve grasped it’s inner-meaning in a satisfying way. For some things you read that remains elusive, even with proper guidance. So, we fall back on the history of things. As if the stenography of the past can help predict the future.

I’ve come around to a different form of reading as I’ve gotten older: curiosity and ambiguity can make something interesting. Or, as Torres says “Not all ambiguities need be resolved.” There’s a certain comfort in suspending your disbelief and throwing yourself into the broader question, why would someone write this, what were they trying to say?

However, the alternative side to that, and the one I feel most empathetic towards, comes from people who do have their “bits” and “snatches” mined for public consumption. To those folks, it’s easy to feel sympathy, after all, they never consented to being the villains or heroes of someone else’s story. They never consented to public or private declarations of poetic symbolism, no matter how well-written it is. I think, like most writing, you have to approach it in some empathetic and ethical way. You have to be willing to have a million conversations refuting the reality of your fiction, for your sake and perhaps for some of theirs—even if they don’t see it that way. Maybe, in some ways, you do have to be willing to not write about it, though as (and I’m paraphrasing here) Curtis Sittenfeld, author of alt-history novel Rodham put it in a recent episode of On The Media, “do people know how novels work?”2

What I’m trying to grapple with here is that Torres isn’t writing about the importance of autobiographical fiction but he does seem to be writing about histories, imagined and real. Blackouts asks us to consider a lot about history and heritage and ponder the many different ways narratives are changed, revised, or rewritten for the people that write them. Juan’s project of Blacking out the pages of Sex Variants acts ultimately as a form of reclaiming a lost history. Here, rather than present queer people in their medical terminology, he’s reimaging their lives through the process of omission.

Consider the Blackout passage “Narcissistic Cases” excavated from the page 471 of Sex Variants

Here Juan’s new story is less complete but still just as valuable. Their wants and desires are subverted, perhaps tweaked for the purpose of Juan’s own story. But, if you squint hard enough you can see through the black, get insight into the original bit the biographical self or situation. Or you can take what you see at face value, and read the reinvention, the fiction.

So, in some respects, there is utility in the autobiographical, some form of new creation, of genesis—at least that’s what I tell myself. And, while this isn’t a complete thought3, I think there’s some link to that form of fictionalizing the past with the present and how it reflects the way we learn to love people. As nene says to Juan “Sure, Juan. But at that time in life, as far as I could make out, there was one way to get a person to fall in love with you—thrashing.” Perhaps autofic is a form of thrashing, or at the very least it feels a bit like thrashing to me.