Nonfiction by Julie Myerson

Julie Myerson has, somewhat confusingly, written a novel called Nonfiction. The confusion of course is the point, because this is her squarest attempt so far at auto-biographical fiction. The French author Serge Doubrovsky is widely credited with writing the first ‘autofiction’ when he published Fils in 1977. Autobiographical novels have proliferated ever since, notably by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and Edward St Aubyn. Hari Kunzru, when asked to discuss similarities between himself and his protagonist in Red Pill (2020), said: ‘It was just the simplest solution to a set of problems to give him the furniture of my biography.’

Myerson’s narrator is a novelist whose father dies by suicide and who has a child with a drugs problem. (The furore in 2009 over Myerson’s The Lost Child, partly about her eldest son’s skunk habit, was so great that a sympathetic journalist summed up the pre-publication reaction in an article entitled ‘Hating Julie Myerson’.)

I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud

The springboard for Esther Freud’s eleventh novel comes from her own life – as it did for her debut novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), which told the story of her childhood adventures in Morocco with her mother and sister. This time around, Freud has drawn on her mother’s concealment of her pregnancy with her first child, Freud’s elder sister Bella. Bernardine Coverley – Esther Freud’s late mother – became pregnant at eighteen by the artist Lucian Freud and kept this a secret from her strict Irish Catholic parents. Even after Coverley had a second child with Freud, she decided not to tell her family. The first her parents heard of their grandchildren was when a relative wrote to tell them she had seen their daughter waiting at a bus stop with two small girls.

I Couldn’t Love You More is, as Freud writes in the acknowledgements, “a response to the idea: what would have happened if she’d been found out, or if she’d asked for help from the wrong people?”