by Writing Workshops Staff
2 weeks ago
How autofiction empowers your trauma-informed story
by Victoria Costello
Anyone taking an advanced writing course can expect to be immersed in stories containing some of the worst possible things that can happen to a human being. Parental abuse and neglect, addiction, war, rape, the loss of a loved one, chronic illness — these are the equal opportunity, life-altering wounds that won’t leave us alone and, if you’re a writer, beg for resolution through the written word.
In one memoir class I taught, the sheer amount of childhood abuse shared in our weekly workshop prompted one student to make the dark suggestion that we hold a contest to determine who had the worst parents. The vote happened and produced some much-needed comic relief.
The act of writing itself offers a potentially rich medium for resurrecting painful memories. This is especially true if a writer allows herself to feel the emotions jarred by the words that appear on the page. For most, this process is enough, and these unruly pages go no further than a file labeled ‘private.’
If, on the other hand, you opt to develop your pages into a full-blown story with a beginning, middle and end with the intention of sharing it with the world, you’ve made a powerful choice with cascading personal and professional implications.
On the writing front, it behooves you to choose a genre for your story sooner rather than later. This is not simply a question of whether what you’ve written is fact or fiction. Yes, truth matters, both to readers and editors at publishing houses. But beyond the typical binary framing of the choice before you, you might also consider how the conventions, or rules, attached to each genre can shape how you tell your story— and by extension, your prospects for real-life healing from the trauma at its center.
As an author who has depicted a heavy load of family trauma first as memoir and then, a decade later, in a partly autobiographical novel, I’ve found the combination of fact and fiction offers unique advantages over sticking to a single genre.
Five ways autofiction can add depth and muscle to your trauma-informed story and enhance its power as an agent of healing.
1. What if? Ask the question and find your hidden plot.
What if critical facts of your own life and your ancestral lineage are not available to you?
For example, in many cases of sexual violence against a child, a fierce denial protects the perpetrator in what is often a multi-generational pattern of abuse and silence. As a result, the adult survivor suffers myriad physical and psychological symptoms, with the truth often obscured by varying degrees of amnesia.
How can a survivor of such abuse describe what happened to them with any certainty? In a memoir, they’re obliged to differentiate between known facts and speculation, with the governing rule being that any fictionalization of real-life events should be brief and acknowledged as such.
But what if this writer’s muse, combined with their desire to heal what has become unmanageable, persuades them to go deeper and explore in depth what might have happened to them? Unlocking vague memories, they might recover a more probable truth.
They could also create a different outcome for this ‘worst possible thing’ that happened to them. For example, what if they told someone outside the family who believed them, and the perpetrator was hauled off to jail? By entering the domain of autofiction, the writer added muscle to their plot and opened the door to healing on the page and in real life.
How so? Consider the latest neuroscience research: where test subjects shown images of emotionally provocative or calming situations manifest the same brain waves as individuals who experience that situation in real life, to begin to understand the plasticity of our brains and bodies. And the nascent field of narrative medicine, with findings that patients who simply changed the point of view in the treatment of their illness from “I” to “we” made measurable progress towards recovery.
2. Name your worst trait to create a multi-faceted protagonist
Autofiction is the only literary genre where the author is also its narrator and main character.
When I work with a writer trying to add dimensionality to their protagonist in a trauma-centered work of autofiction, I suggest they begin by identifying their most self-defeating behavior. Do they push people away because no one can be trusted? Do they fail to finish what they start? Behind this negative behavior inevitably lurks a false belief. The two most common: I don’t deserve to be loved, and I’m not good enough. Once the author, who, remember, is also the story’s narrator and main character, pins down the false belief driving much of what they do in life, their next job is to survey who else in the family tree exhibits the same behavior.
By tracing this ancestral pattern, the family’s unresolved wound can be translated into a dominant character flaw for the author/narrator/protagonist. This flaw then contributes to the story’s precipitating incident, that is, the situation that reflects what’s no longer working for the protagonist; also the event that launches the plot AKA the aspect of the protagonist that has to change. If yours is a multi-generational story, a resonant subplot involving a parent or grandparent’s parallel crisis in an earlier time period also becomes a strong option.
3. Find where in your body traumas live to build an authentic character arc
As millions of readers learned from the bestseller, YOUR BODY KNOWS THE SCORE, trauma can show up in myriad physical and psychological symptoms. If yours is a multigenerational trauma, a medical issue such as an eating disorder can reoccur in successive generations as an epigenetic marker from an ancestor’s experience of famine or wartime food deprivation. In a work of autofiction, where you create a main character based on yourself and the sum total of everyone and everything that shaped your ancestral lineage, these factors become valuable building blocks of character and plot.
The diagnosis of dissociative disorder, often linked to childhood abuse or neglect, can include varied physical and psychological symptoms such as blackouts, numbness, introversion, and extreme social anxiety. And while a diagnosis need not ever be named in your treatment of this character (who is some version of you), these symptoms can be put to work creating a complex protagonist facing high stakes in a compelling story where plot complications trigger symptomatic behaviors and lead to an authentic breaking point and climax. These lines of research and self-inquiry then become rich assets for building a strong character arc with high stakes.
4. Going Meta: when the act of writing becomes a central storyline
In works of autofiction where writing is presented as the main character’s profession or passion, it often functions as the central throughline linking the author’s real and imagined lives. Bestselling authors of autofiction with meta themes include Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Akwaeke Emezi, and Yiyun Li. These authors employ a variety of literary techniques to investigate how writing mediates trauma in their lives, including interviews with their doppelgänger selves and letters sent to key players in their real and/or imagined lives. It’s worth noting that this meta approach can also be effective for authors who lack a publishing track record or a public reputation.
In such writing, each part of the creative process is fair game, including literary fame. Therein, writing provides a mirror for the discovery and potential resolution of trauma in their lives. Importantly, the resolution of trauma, in narrative as in real life, can take many forms, ranging from the author’s simple’ acceptance of themself, warts and all, to exposing the truth of what happened to them, perhaps even exposing a perpetrator, in an imagined time and place which then functions as a court of public opinion.
5. Playing with Hybridity
If, as literary theorists point out, memoirists and novelists hold different contracts with their readers, authors of autofiction can be seen as operating under a hybrid model, where the boundary between fact and fiction is unstable and fluid. This liminal quality, whether the reader is aware of the similarities and differences between the author’s real and imagined lives or not, lends itself to experimental story structures and a variety of techniques adopted from other genres.
Among the most interesting of these are the use of a second story (by the same or a different author) within a main story frame, projections of the author/narrator’s future self, actual news clips to expose or mirror the work’s main trauma-related storyline, and the use of real or imagined therapist-patient dialogues to methodically build suspense towards the exposure of the underlying question of what happened to you.
Are you ready to dive into autofiction?
If you would like to join a small group of writers exploring and adopting these and other unique advantages of autofiction for your life-inspired story, I invite you to check out my latest courses for WritingWorkshops.com.
Up first, a twelve-month workshop and mentorship for intermediate and veteran writers, Advanced Autofiction, beginning on June 18, 2025.
An introductory six-week workshop, When Memoir Becomes Autofiction, begins on September 9, 2025.
Victoria Costello is an Emmy Award-winning writer, teacher, and the author of six, published, non-fiction books, including her memoir, A Lethal Inheritance. Her debut novel of autobiographical fiction, Orchid Child (June 2023). Read more about Victoria's approach to writing trauma-informed autofiction at her website, STORIES THAT HEAL.
