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A Semi-Comprehensive Look at Semi-Autobiographical Novels

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In early 2016, I wrote about semi-autobiographical novels. Now that nearly 10 years have passed, I suppose it would be semi-okay to write about those books again — mentioning semi-autobiographical novels I’ve read since then or had read before then but didn’t mention in that previous post. So, with this semi-decent first paragraph nearly done, here goes:

As I wrote in ’16, semi-autobiographical novels “can be the best of both worlds for authors and their readers. That mix of memoir and fiction takes facts and embellishes them and/or dramatizes them and/or smooths them into more coherent form. A partly autobiographical approach also allows authors to potentially pen very heartfelt books — after all, they lived the emotions — and perhaps provides those writers with some mental therapy, too.” I also wrote that a semi-autobiographical novel is often, but of course not always, a debut novel — at least partly because that kind of book might be easier to write; the author can use aspects of her or his own past.

Back here in late 2025, I just read The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, whose 2011 coming-of-age novel was inspired to an extent by the author’s life and a ship voyage he took as a boy from his native Sri Lanka to rejoin his mother in England after his parents had separated several years earlier. A boy named…hmm…Michael. The Cat’s Table is another compelling book by The English Patient author, who went on to live in Canada.

Another semi-autobiographical/coming-of-age novel (those two things often go together) is Betty Smith’s 1943 bestseller A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — about a brainy girl (Francie) growing up in an impoverished urban family.

Then there’s Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, who loosely based her classic 1868-69 novel on herself and her three sisters.

A few decades earlier, Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic 1826 novel The Last Man featured three principal characters based on herself, her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and their friend and fellow writer Lord Byron.

Aldous Huxley also used famous people as models for characters in his 1928 novel Point Counter Point — including himself, Nancy Cunard, D.H. Lawrence, and Katherine Mansfield.

The characters in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) are somewhat modeled on the author’s father (attorney Atticus Finch in the novel), herself (Scout in the book) and Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote (fictionally named Dill).

Kurt Vonnegut’s horrific World War II experiences were fuel for his sci-fi-infused 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, and Jack Kerouac’s travel experiences provided fodder for his On the Road (1957).

Some of the semi-autobiographical novels mentioned in my 2016 post include James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, Charles Bukowski’s Hollywood, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Colette’s The Vagabond, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jack London’s Martin Eden, W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Herman Melville’s Typee, L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “When Christmas-tree lights reflect off the window, it’s a pane in the grass.”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which contains a tale of two meetings — is here.

When There’s No ‘Rush’ Between Novels

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Clockwise from top left, Rush bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson (photo credit: Rush), new Rush drummer Anika Nilles (Richard Ecclestone/Redferns), and the late Neil Peart (Clayton Call/Getty Images).

Last week, the band Rush announced it would go on a concert tour again in 2026 for the first time in 11 years. (Stick with me here; this will eventually be a literature post. 🙂 )

A lot has happened since 2015 with one of my favorite bands. Rush stopped touring mostly because the Canadian group’s legendary drummer/lyricist Neil Peart needed to end the physical and mental strain of more than four decades of hard-slamming, intricate percussion work. His bandmates — vocalist/bassist/keyboardist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson, the friends from childhood who co-created the music paired with Peart’s words — decided not to continue the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band without their close pal and went on to do other things. That included Lifeson playing in another band (Envy of None) and Lee writing a best-selling memoir and a coffee-table book focusing on bass guitars.

Peart himself was a prolific nonfiction-book author whose Rush lyrics included many literary references; see below for a 2020 post of mine about that. Sadly, “The Professor” (as Peart was known) died that year of brain cancer. It definitely looked like Rush was done — until last week’s news.

It’s a Fact That Rush’s Lyricist Loved Fiction

The grand conclusion to all this? Brilliant drummer Anika Nilles of Germany was chosen by Lee and Lifeson to sit in Peart’s spot behind the kit — with the permission of Peart’s widow and daughter.

Anyway, this is a long intro to a literature theme Rush’s announcement made me think of — authors going a long time before writing a novel again. (I’ve previously done variations on this theme, including instances of a long gap between a famous novel and its sequel.)

The first author that came to mind was Herman Melville, whose last published novel in his lifetime came out in 1857 despite him not dying until 1891. Poor sales, negative reaction from critics, and other factors put a halt to a decade-plus of very prolific book writing, though Melville in his non-novel years did do some poetry in addition to his customs inspector job. Still, Melville started the novel Billy Budd a few years before his death — and it became a success when published posthumously in 1924 and republished in a more complete 1962 edition.

Melville’s friend Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first novel, 1828’s Fanshawe, didn’t sell well and the author turned to short stories and other things for a long 22 years before The Scarlet Letter arrived in 1850. That became an instant classic, and several other novels followed fairly quickly.

Then there’s Marilynne Robinson, whose debut novel Homecoming came out in 1980 — followed by a 24-year gap before her second novel Gilead was published. Why? Robinson turned to nonfiction writing and to teaching. The author released novels more often after 2004.

Arundhati Roy also wrote an acclaimed debut novel — 1997’s The God of Small Things — before two decades went by until her second novel, 2017’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Like Robinson, Roy wrote nonfiction in between and was also involved in plenty of political activism in India.

Of course, some novelists come out with a new title only once in a while because they’re slower writers and/or write ambitious books that take a lot of time. That’s the case, for instance, with Donna Tartt — whose only three novels were published in 1992, 2002, and 2013; now 12 years and counting until a possible fourth. A similar trajectory for Jeffrey Eugenides — only three novels, in 1993, 2002, and 2011, with other years taken up by plenty of short stories as well as teaching.

To reference the title of one of Rush’s most famous songs, there can be a long gap between time in the “Limelight,” and inspiration doesn’t always arrive like clockwork. (Clockwork Angels was Rush’s last studio album.)

Your thoughts on, and/or any examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “As Robert Frost wrote, ‘Good fences make good YouTube videos.'”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…as well as a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, and includes many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a new councilor and a deficit referendum decision — is here.

Paying Deference to Novelistic Self-Reference

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Was W. Somerset Maugham relaxing after appearing in his own book? Maybe. 🙂

Our attention is definitely captured when authors directly or indirectly refer to themselves and their own books in their novels.

This can give readers an additional sense of a writer’s personality, and provide other extra elements to a book — including humor. On the possibly negative side, “self-insertion” can puncture fiction’s illusory world and remind readers that there’s an authorial presence pulling the strings.

The example of “self-insertion” I noticed most recently was when Elin Hilderbrand had one of her fictional characters in The Five-Star Weekend buy a Hilderbrand novel while in a Nantucket bookstore. Some delightful authorial self-mocking was part of the scene as another character tried to ply the Hilderbrand-interested character with more “serious” literature.

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote novel, the title character has Cervantes’ debut book in his library. Also, another character in the classic 17th-century work says he’s a friend of Cervantes.

Then there’s John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which was partly inspired by the author’s own family history. So it’s not a total surprise when Steinbeck himself pops up for a brief cameo in the novel.

W. Somerset Maugham put somewhat more of his actual self in his latter-career novel The Razor’s Edge when his searching-for-meaning-in-life protagonist — the fictional Larry Darnell — has a deep discussion about spirituality and more in a Paris cafe with…Maugham. (Of Human Bondage, the Maugham novel considered that author’s masterpiece, is actually more semi-autobiographical than The Razor’s Edge.)

And Emile Zola put a LOT of himself in his novel The Masterpiece; the book’s fictional author Pierre Sandoz is clearly based on Zola himself, who had a long real-life friendship with painter Paul Cezanne. The Masterpiece‘s protagonist — painter Claude Lantier — is partly based on Cezanne as well as Claude Monet and Edouard Manet.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator character is obviously Vonnegut himself. There are even these lines: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”

Herman Melville did a self-reference variation by having the title character in Pierre write a book that appalled its would-be publisher. This plot twist was a way for Melville to vent about the poor critical and commercial reception for Moby-Dick, released the previous year. Pierre — which, like Moby-Dick, was ahead of its time in various ways — would also sell badly, and cause lots of controversy with its implied-incest element.

Of course, as several early commenters rightly note below, most novelists put something of themselves in the books they write — even if subconsciously. My post mostly focused on when writers do this in a pretty overt way. 🙂

Your thoughts on, and examples of, this topic?

Misty the cat says: “I’m on the windswept moors of ‘Wuthering Heights.'”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.


In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about past-due school district bills, a township manager payout, diminished mass transit, and more — is here.