“The Bad Thing that You Are”: Autofiction and the Internet as Competing Modes of Self-Construction in Megan Boyle’s Liveblog

Today, the internet deeply influences our experience of self. As Sherry Turkle explains, “the projection of self onto computational media is as consistent as it is dramatic” since the internet’s beginning, amounting not so much to “a second self but a new generation of self, itself” (5). Alexis Wolfe expands on how our “increasingly digital existence contributes to a heightened sense of self-consciousness” since “the ‘self’ is the central node, anonymous or otherwise, in digital fields” where we continually encounter “‘identification’ and ‘profiles’—condensed (distorted, sanitized, dramatized, perfected) simulacra of the Real person” (45). Rather than simply stabilizing the concept of the self through increased representation, the internet simultaneously destabilizes it, a problem to which the literary genre of autofiction responds. According to Zara Dinnen, Sheila Heti’s autofiction How Should a Person Be? indexes the “anxieties and processes of selfing—of constructing, working on, and producing a recognizable social self” within a time of “social media indeterminacy” (85). Social media indeterminacy names the phenomenon by which values of authenticity, transparency, and sincerity of the self are often juxtaposed on the internet with their polar opposites: anonymity, artifice, and deception. Not only a mode of self-construction, the internet also functions as a mode of self-deconstruction. Users can lose themselves within the internet’s infinite supply of mirrors, where reflections blend with projections and misdirections.

Megan Boyle’s autofiction project Liveblog also investigates the processes of selfing in the internet era, although it does so in more experimental fashion, cultivating a novel from the very soil of the internet. Starting as a Tumblr blog on 17 March 2013, Liveblog sought to document every aspect of Boyle’s life, in the form of unrelenting written updates posted every five to sixty minutes or so while Boyle was awake. As Boyle states at the beginning of Liveblog, the reason for this documentation was an “uncontrollable sensation of [her] life not belonging to [her] or something … like it’s just this event [she doesn’t] seem to be participating in much, and so could be attending by mistake. maybe [she wasn’t] invited. clerical error” (5). As a response to this feeling, Boyle attempts to employ the internet as a technology of the self, defined by Michel Foucault as a means of “reflection on modes of living, on choices of existence, [and] on the way to regulate one’s behavior” (89). As Foucault relates through examples from Roman and Greek culture, early technologies of the self involved the recounting of one’s actions and thoughts in writing to an imagined other, such as detailing one’s everyday life in notebooks or letters to friends. Recalling such practices, Boyle’s first post laments how “the only person ‘keeping tabs’ on [her] life is [herself],” and so enlists an unknown audience on the internet to regulate her behaviour, rendering the project “a functional thing that will hopefully help me feel more like improving myself” (5). Yet, when the original blog concluded on 1 September 2013, it had arguably failed to constitute a technology of the self, with Boyle’s sense of self having worsened rather than improved.

Previously the author of a book of poetry, multiple short stories, and creative non-fiction, Boyle stresses in Liveblog her inability to write creatively as opposed to simply transcribing events from real life, displaying an entangled relationship between a declining sense of self and a declining desire to write fiction. Although some critics unbalance the compound of autofiction by elevating “fiction” as “more important” than the “auto” (Lorentzen), or arguing for the “cleav[ing] [of] auto from fiction” (Kim 570), Liveblog illustrates the magnetism of “fiction” and the “auto” within the genre in portraying their linked decline; when one fades, the other fades as well. Accordingly, rather than breaking up autofiction into a privileged term (fiction), and a deprivileged term (auto), Liveblog demonstrates the necessary union of these two terms for the literary genre in the internet era.

After a laborious five years of...