Nuts and Bolts: autofiction,

 Autofiction is a genre that exists between fiction and non-fiction where the narrator has the same name as the writer of the work (often a novel) and the outline of the story does to some degree follow the writer's life.

It will feature nonfictional events, but will also include incidents and characters which are partly, and sometimes wholly, invented.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's series of books My Struggle, is a well-known example.

One thing autofiction probably has to feature is a protagonist (or perhaps a narrator) who is a writer.

Autofiction is often trying to give a "truer" impression of a writer's life than the actual truth might - and of course any account of anything can never be entirely factual.

But a reader's reaction to fiction is rather different from that to nonfiction (and fiction has to be vaguely likely, which nonfiction doesn't) so autofiction remains a tricky and delicate kind of thing.

And it's not as if autobiography is usually exactly factual, is it?

Word To Use Today: autofiction. The Greek word autos means self. Fiction comes from the Latin fingere, to shape.