The Problem With Autofiction in Baby Reindeer

 The problem with autofiction like Baby Reindeer, is that it is simultaneously too nuanced and too accessible of a narrative. The creator attempted to shed light on the experiences of a male protagonist who experiences grooming, rape, stalking, and all the mental illness that springs from such things, things that as a society we generally think of as happening to women, but the contemplation and conversation that would naturally bubble up from a fictional tale like this is stifled because of the marketing and the opening line: “This is a true story.” Because of this, the audience finds themselves ruminating over what is real and what has been fictionalized, even going so far as to attempt to find out the real-life identities of the fictionalized characters who, of course, have been fictionalized to protect their identities. 

One of my favorite comedians, Hasan Minhaj, was called out in The New Yorker for blurring the line between fact and fiction with what he called “emotional truths,” and I’d argue that this show falls in the same category. Not that I’m arguing against the show or even Minhaj’s stand-up which The New Yorker said “blur[s] the lines between entertainment and opinion journalism.” Minhaj later responded with a lengthy video for his fans explaining how he’d written his set, what he meant by “emotional truth,” and the lengths he’s gone to in order to protect the identity of the girl he talked about in his first Netflix special, Homecoming King. As Minhaj explained, the emotional truth, the feeling the audience gets from a particular story, is meant to replicate the feeling he’s experienced, even if the story has to be nudged towards fiction a little bit in order to deliver that punch to the audience. In the same way that Minhaj taught us about what it felt like to grow up as a first-generation Indian-American in buttfuck nowhere, California, so does Richard Gadd place us squarely in the terrifying experiences of grooming, rape, and stalking. Gadd is on record now saying in The Guardian that “What’s been borrowed is an emotional truth, not a fact-by-fact profile of someone” in regards to the Martha character, but neither that nor his plea to fans to not go looking has stopped internet sleuths from digging in and harassing a woman they suspect is the real-life character. 

While fictionalized true stories can be of benefit to shedding light on intimate issues in a way that avoids defamation and protects identities, audiences that are less interested in the nuance of what these stories are telling can ruin a good thing by taking the truth too literally and missing important aspects of stimulating questions we should be bringing to society. 

This happened, in a much tamer way, to me when I published my first novel, Rose’s Locket. After it was in the hands of people who were acquainted with me or didn’t know me at all, I got questions like, “Was the Matt character your first boyfriend?” Or “I’m glad you didn’t give your daughter up for adoption.” And even, “I can’t believe this happened to you when you looked for your birthmother” when, in fact, I hadn’t yet searched at the time. Over and over, I had to explain that while there were small crumbs of emotional truth concealed in my book, the main of it was fictional, a book’s worth of a what-if experiment, characters who’d grown on their own beyond the people I attempted to base them on. 

In narrative studies, the term “autofiction” is still highly contested and debated and now, it seems, the world outside of academia is beginning to ask some of the same questions. Breaking down the term, “auto” refers to the self while “fiction” refers to some kind of departure from reality, but beyond that, the varying definitions of autofiction are many. 

But, I wonder, what happened to artistic license? Respect for people's privacy? Autofictional tales, especially traumatic ones dealing with racism, abuse, and fractured identities are stories that need to be told so that as a society, we can grapple with how we should go about preventing real-life experiences that lead to such pain. But we have to be willing to accept the art as it comes to us and fight the feeling to dissect the facts from the fiction. These stories are emotionally true, emotionally fraught, and they take a good amount of courage to compose. So, instead of asking “who is this?”, we should be asking, “how do we go about changing so that stories like this happen less often?”