Josh and I have our first 1 on 1 conversation and it could not have gone better. We talk about the genre of autofiction from a lot of different perspectives. Josh is an obsessive reader and writer of autofiction. He's working on an extended project called Autoportrait, which is made up of a mountain of seemingly unrelated declarative sentences about his life. The cumulative effect is sort of magical. Josh didn't develop this style on his own. He found a book called Autoportrait by the French writer Édouard Levé and felt compelled to try out the form himself. Throughout our conversation, we consider the important role French writers of the 80s and 90s play in defining the genre. We talk about the alternative journalism and zine culture roots of autofiction in writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Eve Babbitz and Lisa Crystal Carver as well. And we talk about proto-autofiction coming from unexpected places; The Diary of Anne Frank and Notes From the Underground. We discuss the way women are ghettoized by the term Memoir, the explosion of recovery memoirs, and how James Frey would have been saved by defining himself as an autofiction writer. We talk about the most important works in recent history with writers like Tao Lin and Shelia Heti. We talk about where it's all going and how the use of other platforms will become offshoots of autofictional writing. This is by no means a complete picture but I think it might be the deepest one in existence so far. 

If you're interested in listening to Josh read chapters from his Autoportrait, you can find those episodes of Misery Loves Company here: 

Chapter 1 + 2: https://youtu.be/G8mVEWCFGYs?si=rPhaVCtFoZSFen-r&t=1866

Chapter 3 + 4: https://youtu.be/E9qyRd3xYng?si=UdBMM87jv1f4452G&t=2031

Chapter 5 + 6:  https://t.co/LsKMfmpNVY

Chapter 7 + 8: https://youtu.be/elh0GFSkpsc?si=jjUln0cajs0SBFEv&t=1940