DIESER ROMAN BASIERT auf einer wahren Begebenheit. Daruber hinaus ist jede Ahnlichkeit mit lebenden oder toten Personen sowie realen Geschehnissen rein zufallig und nicht beabsichtigt.” (This novel is based on one true event. Beyond that, any similarities to people living or dead as well as to any real events are purely coincidental and not intended.) The reader encounters this legal statement on opening Charlotte Roche's 2011 novel Schoßgebete, before turning the page to start reading what has been another huge success for its author after her debut Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands, 2008), which is said to have sold around two million copies. While such disclaimers today seem fairly standard, upon finishing this text, which bears the description “novel” on its cover, the reader is struck by the necessity, but also the inapplicability, of the legal disclaimer that refutes the close and complicated relationship of fiction and fact as presented in Schoßgebete.

This chapter focuses on exactly this intertwined relationship by reading the narrative as an autofiction, as coined by literary theorist and author Serge Doubrovsky when describing his own experimental text Fils (Son/Threads, 1977). Historically, the concept emerged “at a time of severely diminished faith in the power of memory and language to access definitive truths about the past or the self,” as Johnnie Gratton points out. In literary scholarship, the term has been applied widely since, generally describing a “variante de l'ecriture autobiographique …, qui tend a abolir la frontiere entre la fiction et la non-fiction” (variation of autobiographical writing … that tends to remove the border between fiction and nonfiction). My understanding of autofiction is informed by the psychoanalytic connotations the term has for Doubrovsky. It recognizes an element of play—and within that opportunities for cross-media per formance—in the autofictional mode, which authors such as Roche today consciously exploit. Autofiction here is seen as a form of life writing that proves aptly contemporary, being much more fluid and harder to grasp than other forms of (more conventional) autobiographical writing.