There’s one question that makes me want to roll my eyes so hard they disappear into the back of my skull and give you a great big fat face palm:

“So… is this autobiographical?”

Let me rant for a minute.

First, it’s invasive. You’re not asking about the story, you’re asking about me. You’re trying to sniff out where my scars are, which characters are my family in disguise, and whether I secretly had an affair with the villain. And honestly? That’s none of your damn business.

Second, it’s ignorant. Fiction is not autobiography. If you want autobiography, that’s called memoir. Different shelf. Different project. Different set of artistic responsibilities. If I wanted to do that, that’s what I’d be doing. I’m interested in making meaning of human dramas, not navel gazing (does the world really need yet another Eat, Pray, Love?).

Third, it’s naive. Because even when fiction grows from the compost heap of a writer’s lived experience (and it always does), that doesn’t mean the story on the page is “about me.” It means I’ve alchemized the raw material into art.

Here’s what differentiates fiction from autobiography (and why it matters):

Fiction is transformation. 

The writer takes life—their own, other people’s, the collective human mess—and distills it, reshapes it, stretches it until it becomes something larger than a single lived experience. Memoir looks inward; fiction radiates outward.

Fiction is universal. 

In memoir, the writer is the protagonist. In fiction, characters are vessels—archetypes, shadows, mirrors—crafted to invite the reader into the meaning-making.

Fiction is freedom. 

In memoir, the author owes allegiance to what “really happened.” In fiction, truth lives in the emotional resonance, not the factual accuracy. Fiction allows for invention, exaggeration, metaphor. It gives us worlds we’ve never seen, time machines, and whole families who never existed but feel achingly real.

So when you ask me if my work is autobiography, you’re not appreciating the craft. You’re reducing it. You’re tugging the focus away from the architecture of the story, the themes, the imagery, the impact, and you’re sticking your nose into my personal life.

And honestly? That’s lazy reading.

If you want to read a writer’s work deeply, ask better questions:

• What themes haunt this book?
• How does this character’s struggle illuminate my own?
• What did this story stir up in me, and why?
• What questions does it leave me holding?

That’s the conversation worth having.

This is the soil where my fiction grows: experiences transformed into meaning, pain transmuted into art, threads woven into something bigger than myself.

So no. My fiction isn’t autobiography. My fiction is fiction. And if that disappoints you? Maybe you’re more interested in gossip than literature.

My fiction doesn’t reveal me. It exposes you—if you dare to pay attention.