Since the 1960s, structural shifts in the publishing industry and the wider economy – commonly denoted by the term “neoliberal” – have expanded and intensified the commercial pressures on the literary field. This chapter’s first section identifies the specific forms that neoliberalism has taken in the world of publishing and bookselling. The second section examines how recent novels by Kate Zambreno, Eugene Lim, and Jordy Rosenberg self-consciously negotiate the publishing industry’s simultaneous yet conflicting demands for novelty and familiarity, especially as they relate to expectations surrounding representations of femininity, race, ethnicity, and trans identity. The concluding section reads recent fiction by Helen DeWitt and Rachel Cusk as meditations on how, rather than simply decrying, or capitulating to, the growing power of literary marketing and promotion, the “serious” contemporary writer might – at least in principle – utilize that power precisely in order to stimulate consumer appetite for seriousness as a desirable literary quality.

This chapter considers the forms and functions of feminist writings from life in the twenty-first century, illuminating a perceived shift in the conception of the personal-as-political. Part one addresses recent feminist memoirs which seek to memorialise a period and a collective experience, thereby doing history as autobiography (Andrea Dworkin’s Heartbreak (2002) and Lynne Segal’s Making Trouble: Life and Politics (2007)); it asks how and to what ends past feminisms are narrated and remembered in the present. Part two turns to the emergence of generically inventive and autofictional forms of life writing by women in recent years. Mixing essay, fiction, theory, and autobiography, texts such as Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) and Chris Kraus’s Aliens and Anorexia (2000) displace the writing ‘I’ via the incorporation and assimilation of various other life stories. I assess the possibilities and limitations of this embrace of empathetic intersubjectivity as an ethical strategy of recent feminist life writing, considering how this reframesin perhaps problematically privatised waysearlier notions of solidarity and collectivity.

Chapter 2 is concerned with the role of the writer as artist. It focuses on three auto/biographical texts which document the ugly difficulties of writing the self: Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). None of these texts is a pure autobiography: Bechdel’s graphic memoir follows her psychotherapeutic unravelling of her relationship with her mother; Heti’s ‘novel from life’ recounts a crucial friendship between Sheila and her artist friend Margaux; and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines is part memoir, part biographical essay about female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Vivien(e) Eliot, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who she dubs the ‘mad wives’ of modernism. All three texts are interested in female genius and tell of the unravelling of the self from others en route to becoming an artist. I argue that ugliness is crucial to their aesthetic projects: the ugliness of the self and its secrets, the ugliness of writer’s block, the ugliness of betrayal, and the ugly terrain of genius.