Self-creation and auto-fiction

Yet in my heart I was bereft, grieving — homesick for a place I had never seen. For a place that doesn’t exist, yet I belonged there nonetheless.

— Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett

Auto-fiction is an intriguing literary genre. Part fiction, part autobiography, whenever I read a book that falls under this category I feel like I’m having a terrific conversation with its author sitting next to me. This is beautifully achieved by writers that I love such as Marcel Proust or J. M. Coetzee, but I had a wonderful time listening to Elif Batuman as well.

I’ve recently experienced a somewhat similarly pleasant feeling with Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19. I needed something to take my mind away from the dark places The Bell Jar and A Little Life had built for me, but I wasn’t expecting to be so captured by Bennett’s work.

This is due first and foremost to Bennett’s writing style. Whereas, say, Elif Batuman clearly unfolds events as she ventures to explore and perhaps relive her past in chronological fashion, Bennett lets her pen move on a seemingly free ride. Which is not to say that she’s ransacking her memories randomly and without a clue about the best way to organise her recollection. She isn’t trying to make the stream of consciousness hip again either.

Bennett is recreating herself thanks to the power of language. Instead of listening to her sardonically presenting her coming of age to us, we watch as word after word a storyteller is born. More importantly, we’re not here to witness passively the creation of her own self. Provided we are conscious of the process, we actively participate as we read along. I, for instance, found myself trying to make sense of all the literary references Bennett spreads with adorable confidence throughout the book. I kept track of all the names and the titles I don’t know, but at the same time I was seeing my upbringing as an avid reader mirrored on the pages. When a specific book meant as much to her as it meant to me I couldn’t hide a smile on my face.

This is close yet not the same as the experiences one may share with the protagonist of a novel, being them their author’s alter ego or not. Checkout 19 has of course episodes one can link to their own, but it’s more interesting to observe how Bennett’s writing is shaped by the literary world she builds for herself. The metaphor she chooses, the stories she starts telling abruptly in the middle of a chain of thoughts, not to mention the stark beauty of the sounds carefully picked syllables make. Her mastery of the language is put to test by her own imagination and as we accompany her we detect the challenge with delectation.¹

Is Checkout 19 a challenge on purpose, then? Quite the contrary. Once we’ve adjusted ourselves to the detours, we understand that there’s only one road ahead of Bennett and it’s waiting for us. Modernist and post-modernist writers knew that our thoughts rarely follow straight lines, and so does Bennett. But instead of tracing all the possible combinations on an impossible map, her cartography is simpler and gentler. At all times we are where she wants us to be. We’re lost only insofar as she’s lost. We are literally on the same page.

How much of Claire-Louise Bennett we find in Checkout 19 is not really important. In the end this book is more about the never-ending and transformational processes of language than a rigorous collection of facts we need to put together to have a precise biography. What matters is the spaces Bennett creates for us to fill. The more the blanks in common, the more we share in our own journey of self-creation.

Certain written words are alive, active, living — they are entirely in the present, the same present as you.

— Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett