Where Autofiction and Natural Wine Meet
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It’s the weirdest lead-up to vintage in Australia since I started making wine here five years ago—it keeps raining and meanwhile, the grapes are slowly ripening, a full two weeks later than normal. I think it may be a lean year in terms of yield, but I’m hoping for good vibes and happy ferments anyway.
Just about a week ago, I published a post that I wrote very quickly, impassioned, and which a lot of folks have read. Its wide reach has pushed me to confront the fact that much of my time as a wine writer (or natural wine journalist, whichever) has been defined by anxiety and a general feeling of not being good-enough (good-enough for what? For those who held themselves up with confidence because they were into natural wine three years before me?). It was a piece I nearly didn’t hit the “publish” button on, in part because I worried it would hurt feelings. But a lot of people shared positive feedback, and I appreciate that. I’m glad to know that people want my realest opinions on things.
I just finished reading Maame, an incredibly insightful, well-plotted, funny and relatable novel about a sheltered young woman in London trying to make sense of her life, with a father she cares for who suffers from Parkinson’s and a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana.
For years, I considered autofiction (a genre of fiction that is autobiographical in the extreme, even to the point where it uses the author’s real name—think Karl Ove Knausgaard; Rachel Cusk; Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts) to be the height of artistic achievement. I think we are now a new phase of autofiction, with authors who definitely rely on their experiences while offering a plot that feels cinematic and driven by external realities, as opposed to the flattened, heavily subjective voice of autofiction.
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