Genre defining : Michael Lackey’s conversations with biographical novelists

Abstract

In the Introduction to Conversations with Biographical Novelists: Truthful Fictions across the Globe, editor Michael Lackey recounts how he was approached by someone who said "You're the guy who has invented a whole genre of fiction, aren't you?" (2). This is obviously an exaggeration, but it is true to say that perhaps more than any other contemporary critic Lackey has been responsible for naming, theorizing, and critically exploring the emergence and development of biographical fiction, or "biofiction" for short. In this context, and although it is a stand-alone publication, Conversations with Biographical Novelists can very profitably be read as a companion volume to Lackey's Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists, published in 2014, also by Bloomsbury. The 2019 book adopts the same formula, presenting interviews with authors of biographical fiction in an attempt to understand their individual approaches to this particular form of fiction, and also in the evident hope of giving sharper, more distinctive outlines to the genre. The principal difference between the two books, indicated in their respective titles, is that whereas the former focuses on American authors, Conversations with Biographical Novelists features an impressively broad range of contemporary writers from all over the world. Lackey clearly has strong ideas about what biofiction is, and the interviewers he has gathered together to interview no fewer than eighteen writers are clearly all, as it were, "on message." This helps give the book an overall coherence that it might otherwise lack given the diverse range of writers featured, though as I will outline in greater detail later it does lead to a tension between a sometimes quite programmatic attempt to taxonomize the genre, on the one hand, and the wilfully untameable nature of fiction, represented by the writers, on the other.