Bad Genre: Annie Ernaux, Autofiction, and Finding a Voice
Annie Ernaux
“When I was twenty-one,” wrote Zadie Smith at age twenty-five, “I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault.” What is a writer’s voice? Surely, as in life, we all have many voices, different ones for different occasions.
For the young Zadie Smith, Kafka’s voice established a norm: this is what literature sounds like. Different genres—fiction, academic articles, general nonfiction—conjure certain expectations. I write differently in all of them. But over the last couple of years, I’ve started to feel the strain of singing so many styles on the page, and I’ve started to wonder: What does my own voice sound like, freed from the mold? Do I even have one?
As any classically trained singer or actor can tell you, trying to make your voice sound like someone else’s can do all manner of damage to it. Voicing relies on friction between the breath and the folds of the vocal cords, but the cords can wither or be damaged from being struck too harshly.
