The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz (review)

"We are all fictioneers"; so wagers a character in one of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized autobiographies.¹ It is an utterance that reveals something true about every effort to tell the story of one's life, whether to oneself or to others. The famed writer describes his experimental memoirs as "autrebiographies"; beset by a predicament which renders efforts to capture the past, and the self who once occupied it, an incomplete, perhaps finally, impossible task, his neologism highlights how every instance of personal history is mediated by the distortions of memory and the indeterminacies of language. Accordingly, the only truly true account of the self is the one prepared to admit it is an unfinished story which offers a nonbinding interpretation of the incidents, people, and emotions it details. The self-written-life (auto-graphia-bios) is truly the life told about another: an other (autre). It is the life about oneself told when looking back through history's gloaming upon the hazy figures and events that populate an ever-transforming past; the person one is and the person one writes about share a name but may appear to each other like two different people. At which point, it must be acknowledged, any keen distinction between biography and autobiography threatens to break down (to say nothing about the implications this view may hold for writing history or bearing witness). The self as such only becomes understandable in the moment it articulates—to others, proximate or implied—the story of one's life.

Yet that the task of telling the truth about oneself should be in some sense "impossible" is not to wallow in an unnavigable quagmire of undecidability. For if we hold that all language is structured by patterns and norms of narration, or what could be called fictivity, this does not undermine the notion of truth so much as reckon with its forms, as we critically reflect on the truth-content of the many stories we encounter (and tell) in their various spaces of emergence. By admitting to the fictional aspect of all narrative—perhaps especially including the stories concerning those selves we presume to know most closely: our selves—we may arrive at a truer truth about the nature of both narrative and subjectivity. This would necessitate acknowledging the fact that we are never just one and, also, that stories need others—other stories, and other people—to co-construct their meaning with us. Questions about the nature, value, and interpretation of narration in the understanding and wellbeing of subjectivity are of particular importance to novel-writing and the psychotherapeutic endeavor, the respective trades of Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz. The pair's shared correspondence has given rise to the lively collection under review, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy.

Published in an earlier form in the literary periodical Salmagundi, The Good Story compiles a series of thoughtful if digressive email exchanges staged between Coetzee and Kurtz, the latter a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in England. As the pair observe in a co-written prefatory note, the medium of language is crucial for their respective work, with narrative, specifically, playing an outsize role. The writer and the psychotherapist are individuals who are centrally "occupied with the exploration, description and analysis of human experience, with finding or inventing linguistic and narrative structures within which to contain experience, and with the outer limits of experience" (vii–viii). The collaboration, initiated by Kurtz, is thus premised on the notion that literature, represented by Coetzee, may teach us something revealing about psychotherapeutic tenets and practices. And perhaps we might even return to literature and its inhabitants with fresh eyes in view of revelations about the nature of psychic life, manifested in the clinical setting. Despite such hopes, the text is chiefly taken up with a discussion of psychotherapy, as Kurtz explains its theoretical principles to Coetzee and...