J. M. coetzee’s trilogy of fictionalized memoirs, or Scenes from Provincial Life as he has subtitled them, provides readers with a quirky and peculiarly Coetzee-like perspective on the genre of autobiography.1 While some reviewers were confused as to the genre of Youth in particular, it is clear that these three texts — Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002) and Summertime (2009) — form a continuum in Coetzee’s life-writing or, as David Attwell puts it, a “life-of-writing.” This most recent text, Summertime, is narrated by a “biographer” supposedly after Coetzee’s death. Covering the years 1972–77 of the writer’s life, and comprising interviews with people who apparently knew the writer, this third volume is even more distanced from the subject of the memoirs than were the previous two, narrated as they were in the third person. Literary techniques such as the blurring of narrative boundaries between the biographical and autobiographical subject and the betrayal of self and others that inevitably form part of writing a memoir draw attention in this text — as other texts by Coetzee have done — to the question of “who speaks” in any literary work. This teasing textual instability and the crossing of narrative borders and genres have increasingly become features of Coetzee’s later works.

This chapter will consider Summertime both within Coetzee’s own elusive life-writing (alongside the previous two memoirs) and in the context of his own critical writing on autobiography. In particular, it will suggest that Coetzee’s writing of the self-as-other obsessively draws attention to the generic conventions of writing a life and to the ethical implications of such writing. In doing so, it both exposes the impossibility of representing “truth” in any genre, whether history, fiction or life-writing, and engages with the problem of authority that has haunted all of Coetzee’s work.

Throughout his fictional oeuvre, and in his commentaries on writing, Coetzee has scrupulously insisted on the constructed discursive nature of both fiction and history, or what is usually understood as either imaginative or factual writing. He has drawn attention to the notion that “everything you write, including criticism and fiction, writes you as you write it” (DP, 17).