The book Fail Worse is an intertextual autofiction that critiques modern writing and its trends, particularly the prevalence of autofiction as a genre. The protagonist, who struggles with writing his autofiction, is trapped in procrastination, reflecting on his personal experiences while attempting to critique the broader literary culture. The narrative intertwines personal musings with commentary on societal and literary events, emphasizing the difficulty of creating something meaningful in a commodified world where authenticity, trauma, and art are often reduced to consumable products. The story is set largely in London, with the protagonist navigating the city's changing landscape, exploring themes of failure, alienation, and the complexity of personal identity.
DM: Your book is the essence of meta. It's a book about literary genres and the books that are your literary references create a literary sphere, so to speak. But also it is a book that focuses on the literary genre of autofiction specifically and dramatises the process of autofictionalizing one own experience, using a satirical accent. Why did you approach this genre in this fashion and at this specific moment?
HWK: I think one of the things as somebody who's reading a lot of fiction, there's this constant flow of books that people read, the “books that matter”. And suddenly everyone was reading this genre of autofiction. It became this aspirational thing in a certain way because it became something that almost everyone I knew who was a writer was working on some variation of. And I found it so pervasive. There would be one book after another that would be described in these terms. The notion of it being metafiction became central for me. It became a question about what makes a book “autofiction”, what makes a book an autobiographical novel, or what makes a book just fiction. I started to kind of think about those questions. I’d never really written a book in the genre of the moment. It all feels very weird to me, so I wanted this weirdness to be the subject for a book, the weirdness and the distance that a writer feels from a sense of where literature is, or where literature is going. And so it became the exploration of that, but it was almost through the distance to the genre, or the distance of what I thought the genre was, or whatever might be thought of as, like, my literary output from that genre, that made me kind of want to engage with it.
This makes me think about the timeliness of literature. And yourself as a character in the autofiction was always untimely, in grasping the moment of inspiration, in dealing with his career, in love relationships, and navigating London’s constant changes. The sense of a time that is always coming but never coming about is very strong in the book and lends a patina of melancholy and vulnerability to the character. He is exposed to time and its spirals. However, the trigger of these states of vulnerability is often atmosphere, not a specific event. This somehow creates a distance between the emotional depth of the character and the reader.
The question of time is really interesting. I think I saw this notion of the timeliness of the book or the timeliness of how one thinks about the time they're in, and this lapse that you're identifying in the story, that the narrator always is coming into awareness of something after it's happened rather than in the right time. I think that is generally how it works. When someone tries to be of the moment, one always ends up kind of looking to the things that are most characteristic of a moment, not to those that are invisible at that moment, but looking back, these “invisible” things, become the only things one sees. And I think that's what maybe I was trying to convey with the writer being out of time. There's a cringe dimension of this writer trying, this main character, or anyone who wants to talk about trying to catch up, to be “of the moment” And the book is one of these attempts, these striving moments to catch up to the discourse, or whatever, and always failing, in pretty disastrous ways. It's something that I've thought about for a long time in terms of how we're always, here I’m quoting a song by the Canadian band Wolf Parade song Shine a Light, “You're waiting on a moment that will never arrive”. I feel like everybody is always chasing this moment that will never arrive. And in fact, it can't arrive, because if it does arrive, it won't be the moment. It will just be the quotidian experience of what you're living through. It will never have the glory and glamor of the thing you're living for. And literature is a place where you can kind of play out your dreams, or whatever, your ideal space. Literature allows you to think about how things went wrong and to depict that.
While I was reading I could feel you writing. You managed very well to recapitulate this bumpy process. The moments when the character is about to start to write are always punctuated by distractions, life happening to you, and around you, in a fluctuation. And you use literature, art, and cultural products as a way of grounding yourself/the character. The use of technology and its ways of platforming cultural objects is different too. It is not about distraction and consumption but recollection of the experience.
Interesting point because this question of using art to ground oneself, is an offline, technological act. Literature being offline is part of its history, but it isn't the moment. I mean, a lot of the literary forms that have emerged in recent years have come through YouTube, like Flarf, Instagram poetry, or TikTok stuff. And booktok is, of course, huge. Everything is so impacted by the Internet. One of the things that came up at San Serriffe, where I did a launch event last night was the question of social performativity on social media. I think a big reason why that is the case is because we have full access 24/7 to everyone's consciousness in a way that we never had before, and those forms of relationships are not grounded. Art, most visual art, on the contrary, is in situ or the material world. Those experiences separate you from a certain kind of community but perhaps create another. I guess that tension pervades throughout the book, but I do think of it as a very online book in a lot of ways because it's a product of this culture of constant introspection and constant subjection to interpretation by other people. This new kind of material relationship that is created by the social media sphere is, I think, a key driver of why people are interested in autofiction in the first place, and so negotiating that tension is a key theme of the book in a lot of ways.
Personal blogs are the product of internet culture and could be posed as the ancestors of contemporary autofiction. And a certain point everyone felt compelled to share their lives on the internet with strangers. There is this passage at the beginning of the book where the character ponders whether or not to activate a Twitter account and jump into another level of fictionalization: the creation of a brilliant public persona. In seeking outer validation or a community online, the biggest contrast between the possibilities of the internet and the fragility, precarity, and dreadfulness experienced by the character in real life creates a dialectic.
This notion of dialectic is an interesting concept to start with because of that specific thing about the Twitter section, where the narrator is thinking about setting up a Twitter account and ponders the question of how do you present yourself there. I feel like the book is full of these moments of selective forms of exposure or performativity. In those cases, the writer is theoretically planning to do this representation of himself on Twitter. But of course, writing a book is also a performance of the self, especially in an autofictional space, and there are all these sorts of fault lines. And now we do live in a way, like having had autofiction be such a prominent genre, where this expectation of self-exposure has been elevated and valorized, the fusion of the character, and the author. And, of course – I mean, no spoilers or anything – but fictional characters become important as the book goes along because one of the themes that it treats is the way that sometimes it's through fiction that this discovery process we spoke about earlier, happens. Things come into being, or come into realization, through that process. And of course, obviously to speak about autofiction now is also to speak about the place other fiction plays in discursive space. Authors for example Maggie Nelson made a theoretical model coming from an embodied experience and positionality. And there's a standpoint epistemology in Marxist theory, and that's evolved in a lot of different ways, too, but I think we're kind of coming to the point when the discussion about the way that making a stance public will be completely conflated with or understood as your identity or your position. And, the way this position is articulated is assumed to be stable in ways that probably were never expected in quite the same way before, except in highly surveilled and policed societies. But now dynamic that is a characteristic of essentially just being alive now, it means you're in a surveilled space. You're in a highly, highly policed discursive space wherein people have expectations of consistency, where when a person falls you know a person inevitably fails to meet expectations, and to avoid appearing consistent or stable they lose certain parts, or they cut off certain parts of their personality or ways of thinking that are not necessarily fitting in with those social norms. And, in a philosophical space or autotheoretical space, this could be damaging, but in a fictional space, it can be productive and interesting, because you end up exploring how those processes take place through the dramatization process of the novel.
I see what you mean. The consistency required by authorship and online performativity is inscribed in the fiction of the stable life which then becomes more easily framed, schematized, surveilled, and representable in a social scheme, or a social expectation. But in the book, I could taste a craving for the unexpected or the event that is intangible, yet which creates a short circuit in the stability, a destabilizing force that would mess up your system of references, and redirect your attention to things happening around you. Like the bike episode. And I see that there is a perception of reality that is simultaneously happening.
These parallels take place in the book: people falling from bicycles, and the precarity that is in the financial position of people, are deliberately there to echo each other. But I do think, as you say, this openness to change and the complexity of life sort of creates these ostensibly meaningful patterns, which may not be meaningful. I mean, this is apophenia the belief that things are connected in ways that they aren't, or at least aren’t in any way you could know. Historically, we didn't have the information space that people are in today, before the internet and before social media. Before the internet we had different stimuli; now, it's almost impossible to not see patterns that aren't there and that are completely meaningless. But we're hardwired mentally to see patterns, and it always feels a little bit like we're on the verge of some kind of schizophrenic situation, where you constantly see irreconcilable information, maybe meaningless, but still, you can't shake the feeling that it creates this mental space that to anybody who's dealing with large levels of information, which is almost anybody nowadays, creates a condition is almost dreamlike or hallucinatory. Some of that sensation is something I'm working on within the book. Because, you know, obviously, again, it's a highly controlled environment a novel; you are structuring it out as the writer, and so you can play with those associations. I hopefully, convey some of the emotional experience to the reader through the way that those things are arranged, those parallels, those apparent patterns, those forms of symbolic awareness, or symbolic returns. Those are laid out in ways that, hopefully, more or less effectively, I think, draw the reader in. It is very much an attempt structurally within the book to provoke those things. And how much could one make of those things being connected? I mean, that's where the readerly interest comes in.
The environment of the novel is London, and its constant changes, and how they follow the author and drift in and out of his routine. I am thinking about Elephant and Castle in South London and its gentrification which is very present in the book. This gives the book a very specific situatedness and contingency in navigating the urbanscape of a big metropolis which is constantly shaped by economic and cultural fluxes. The space of London defines somehow the conceptual space of the book.
That's correct. I think this is a great insight into genres such as auto theory because they give you insights into places and atmospheres that do exist. The question then becomes how you apply that insight and how relevant that is to certain kinds of questions. Ultimately that's where the limits of any kind of embodied awareness are. Autofiction legitimates situated and embodied forms of knowledge, and, ironically, that was the biggest hurdle to overcome in the process.
Another aspect of the book that drew me in is the torsion to build a character and a plot to which the reader could relate. And also made me think that everyone can write about everything, can believe that their experience is worth telling in a relatable measure. This is also part of the performativity we were speaking before. My question here is about the subtext of the book, which is a satiric one, the satire of the genre itself. And I am wondering if this was a device to make it more relatable.
I did want this to be more relatable than anything I'd ever consciously written. I started from the most believable, relatable stuff which comes easier in the culture of permanent awareness we live in. Relatability is also a measure and tool of success. The people who break through now are in this space of relatability and spectacle. So it could be you, in that situation, but it is not. And that’s the gap between relatability and spectacle, a gap where a lot of the aspiration and longing that people bring forward towards influencers, big star streamers, and other public people appears. These highly public figures who have huge followings, they're unspectacular in the sense that their daily life is kind of relatable, but then they're put into these situations through their stream, or their program, or through whatever they are influencing that are far beyond the relatable.
But this is not even relatability, I would say it is familiarity. When I see the TikTok videos of influencers and starlettes I see that they all follow a similar template. There is a lack of self-expression in the quest to constantly be part of and reproduce a trend. But this is another tangent I am taking. Which for me is a good sign. Because the book leads me on different planes of observation.
I wanted to ask you about the relationships you describe in the story. This made me think about an issue raised by McKenzie Wark about the narrative inclusion of others within the autofiction, and how the perception of them could be wrong or misleading. Autofiction writers steal part of their stories from the people surrounding them. I wanted to ask you about the choice of giving names to the characters who are your friends and instead nicknames to your lovers.
That's an interesting point because it is something that I thought a lot about. Why not just give them another name? And one of the main reasons was, I felt like there is an extra privacy layer when there's, like, an intimate dimension. And I think that the idea of using eye color as kind of a distinguishing feature gives an allure which I think the book is kind of working with. It also tells you the level of connection that you would have with the person. With friends, not in a romantic type of situation, I felt like there was a slightly lower bar. Of course, I adopted degrees and hierarchies of how much I wanted to expose certain people in this fictional situation to avoid speculation around anything.
But for me, it's interesting because I think that in the end, by giving nicknames you reached a deeper intimate level, which counterbalances the loneliness that I felt while getting acquainted with the character. Because the relationships of friendship described are present but do not depict a full picture of the person. The character’s lovers instead linger in the memory, and actively participate in this coming back of time past, which supports and deepens the sense of precariety of the character in the movement between Berlin and London.
You bring up this question of loneliness and the characters are always in kind of that state. Some people would say that all literature in Europe is literature of loneliness. But what I would say more to that point, and more to the moment, is I think we're living in an age of supreme loneliness. The capacity for constant connections with people does not necessarily lead to a greater level of understanding or satisfaction in relationships, or even a richer, like, “friendscape” – that’s the term that they used a few years ago to describe people's like social media contacts. This world that we've seen created is perhaps bountiful in terms of numbers, but not as satisfying as they should be, or we’d aspire for them to be. It’s like fast food: you get the immediate hit of sugar, or whatever it is that you want, and then you're hungry an hour later because there are no actual nutrients in it. It's a kind of fast foodification of friendship and relationships that I think we live in now. And this is a recipe for a deep kind of loneliness.
Yes, it is. But this is a diffused problem because this is also the problem of culture and its duration. Like, for example, books that were released five years ago are already old, and outdated by the new discursive tchotchke. And time, and its narration, is always ahead of us. That’s how capitalism operates after all. Something very valuable in your book is that the past, in its literary products, is present. It is evoked continuously, in the perception of non-linearity, the coming and going of references, and their cohabitation in simultaneity and the vertigos they induce. Do you spiral as a person?
It does happen to me in life where you have a thought and it won't leave you alone, and then it just gets out of control. The book is just full of those. Some of them, are painted from life, and some of them are things that I thought, but I would say that a lot of the stuff in the book was inflated consciously. But I would say that, yeah, it is, it is a feature of the way I kind of engage with the world, for better or for worse.
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Fail Worse is published by Arcadia Missa Press and can be purchased here.
- Image Credits
Courtesy Habib William Kherbek and Arcadia Missa Publications.