Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux is the Grande Dame of auto fiction, writings that give a narrative form to one’s life story. Perhaps Geoff Dyer, a personal favourite, can be said to write auto non-fiction, a genre distinct from memoir or autobiography where the writer uses personal experience to give narrative forms to stories external to himself.
No one who has read Dyer’s brilliant Out of Sheer Rage, a book about not writing on D.H. Lawrence should be surprised that his latest, The Last Days of Roger Federer has little on the tennis great. Few writers meander with the certainty of Dyer, few are so confident of the reader forgiving their occasional overreach, few make their sentences sing with the same harmony.
Dyer could neither write the book on Lawrence he set out to do nor walk away from it. “One of the reasons, in fact, that it was impossible to get started on either the Lawrence book or the novel was because I was so preoccupied with where to live. I could live anywhere, all I had to do was choose — but it was impossible to choose because I could live anywhere,” he wrote. Choice is terror.
