Too Weird to Die, Not Rare Enough to Live?
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
You might remember this as the opening line of Hunter S. Thompson's book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I loved Fear and Loathing when I was about 15 and so did every other 15 year old boy since the film featuring Johnny Depp as Thompson was released in 1998.
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Last night, I thought up the following as a possible opening line:
"I was having visions of my own autopsy when the news came in that a lunatic had been elected President."
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After I put that line together in my mind, it quickly felt clear I was harnessing the HST gonzo vibe. The next thought troubled me. I thought, even though a line like this sounds compelling...would I actually keep reading?
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I think the answer is, "No." No I would not keep reading. And the reason is complicated. I don't think Thompson's style is necessarily outmoded so much as our reality is so wild that it feels silly to create a fictional backdrop to a serious and entirely plausible circumstance.
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Notably, we did elect a lunatic President.
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HST, who hated Nixon, and others like him would have been mind-blown that we went so far as to put Trump in the White House. It's pure lunacy. I hate to think that some of these early role models of mine took an early exit because they saw the path of society laid bare before them. No one can blame them though.
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I'm a long-time avid fan of the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman would deliver all this more eloquently than I am. There is a difference though, I imagine, looking at the world, smh-ing, as a GenXer vs. a "Geriatric Millennial". Gen Z will inevitably rediscover and reclaim Thompson in a way that is new and exciting. I'm looking forward to that. In the meantime, I'm stuck with a lot of dead heroes who modeled an early exit as alarmingly acceptable. Not good.
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Let me get back to talking about why I would not have kept reading after that HST-esque line I made up. We're keeping in mind here that I "made it up" as opposed to blended it with a form of reality that felt true and authentic (whether or not you like the word "authentic"; please leave this stigma by the entrance to my imaginary office).
All this is a case for the emergence and, I believe, lasting relevancy of autofiction. Autofiction comes in many forms. I'd hazard that, in general, it's work that is based on real events in the author's life (no "death of the author" here) and embellished enough for a reader to find inroads and more enjoyable takeaways from the reading experience. After all, the word "fiction" is in the word "autofiction" and "fiction" is by all accounts meant to be an enjoyable pastime more than it is intended to be educational. If you wanted to be better educated you should've waltzed over to the non-fiction or memoir sections of the last bookstore within a 50-mile radius of your current whereabouts.
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Autofiction is where we are going to find the next so-called "Great American Novel". This will, inevitably, be determined in hindsight. In the words of Ricky Gervais's character (David Brent) in The Office (UK), "A good idea is a good idea forever."
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