As I've shared with you before, this summer I taught my first zoom autofiction course. This meant I spent a couple of months perusing everything I could find about autofiction and I'm sure I barely scratched the surface.

I loved the course and it was so much fun for all of us, several participants requested a part two

As such, I'm still looking for any new material I can get my hands on in my spare time as I write this second class. This article was particularly interesting and I love that it was from "the other side of the story" i.e., someone who teaches memoir and who has now been written about in what she sees as a negative light herself. So, thank you Susan Shapiro for writing this article titled: "I encouraged my students to write warts-and-all confessional books. Then one wrote about me" in the Independent. 

I would love to hear feedback on this and I've already sent it around to people I know who are just as interested in autofiction and all of it's surrounding genres (yes, there are a lot of them but primarily memoir and fiction).

I would love to know if this has affected the way Susan Shapiro teaches her own classes. I imagine so, but how?

Here's how it starts (below) and do read to the end. 

"Did you read Mary Trump's book?" I asked my mother.

"Another over-therapied writer airing her family's dirty laundry in public," my mother said. "I feel sorry for Mary's aunt. The poor woman didn't know she was being taped."

Her comment stung;she was referencing me and seemed to be over-identifying with Mary's unwilling subject.

Fascinated by Too Much And Never Enough, I'd devoured the explosive bestseller about the Trump family that a judge affirmed Mary's First Amendment right to publish.A left-wing New York memoirist and shrinkaholic her age, I admired her bravery for exposing the past of our dangerous president.Yet I also had a reason to fear being maligned in print.