Truth Is Stranger Than Autofiction

Claire Vaye Watkins, the conspicuously named protagonist of Claire Vaye Watkins’s latest novel, , knows that her vagina has teeth. Claire mirrors the author in many ways beyond their shared name: They’re both writers navigating new motherhood and mourning a father who died when they were young. But those strange teeth—which Claire grows lovingly, in secret—are one of the early hints to the reader that this book is no mere memoir. Rather, Watkins has written a destabilizing autofiction. In fusing the unreal with the hyperreal,.