Danielle Chelosky's Pregaming Grief

On what autofiction still has to offer us, and why, through the lens of the debut of a bright and resolute new voice

We’ve reached such a state of branding fatigue on autofiction as a flash word that it’s hard to imagine many realistic books that wouldn’t fit the definition off the rip. Years ago, I’d mistaken ‘auto’ as short for ‘automatic,’ in that writing straight from one’s life, even as a novel, might hardly need the author to intercede; later, I realized that what I’d been mistaking in that way came from the fact that the foundations of ‘autofiction’ as a genre are conceptual. In the hands of New Narrative-era authors like Chris Kraus or Dodie Bellamy, the means by which one seeks portray their own life also seemed to speak back at it, and thereby capture the world not as a boundless place, but one rather one quite limited—in a good way—according to the model of the author’s mind and how they see themselves in the specific place and time that they exist.

Truly effective autofiction, I suppose, makes it look easy, like anyone could do it if they tried, which in turn opens the door to unforeseen innovation, shirking the canon. Too loosely approached, however, and lacking subtext gleaned through context like social theory and philosophy, even if no such academic rhetoric graces the page, what makes one novel drawn directly from one’s life so different from the novel that would pretend to be invented out of scratch? Often what we end up getting, by the time a unique subgenre gathers enough clout to be commodified by bean counters, comes off all pith, leaving the background work of sourcing meaning, metaphor, or resolution to the imagination—and not in a great way, but rather, like the way all fingerpainting can produce a Rorschach.

Thankfully, despite the glut, this need not always be the case—especially when the work in question doesn’t bother splitting hairs or posturing aloud about its aesthetic intentions, or lack thereof. It’s a testament to Danielle Chelosky’s prowess that her debut novel, Pregaming Grief (SF/LD, 2024)—which indeed does bear many autofictive traits: close first person narration we can associate with the author, short modular sections, references to real life band and books, emotion-driven reflections on relationships and trauma—bears no copy on its back cover, nor any blurbs. An epigraph from Annie Ernaux is all that proceeds the novel’s opening compound sentence, one as unassuming as it is blunt: “Sunlight poured through the café windows; I started crying.” The text proceeds from there to illustrate the ending of a relationship, directed in second person to the love interest, Andrew, whose struggle with heroin and lack of accessibility therein will continue to haunt the book throughout from that point on, despite the bevvy of other interests and attempts on the part of the narrator, who remains nameless, to move on.

What follows is like a series of attempts at exorcism, sans satisfaction, following the young narrator on a string of fleeting hookups in drunken thrall as she attempts to console herself from the self-destructive grips of her despair. The text spends little time on explicit facts of decoration like time and place, character descriptions, or even dialogue, tending instead to present its context stripped down to brass tacks—a sentence here or there that alleviates the need to even know where we are, in favor of focusing instead on how it feels to live inside the narrator’s head. Chelosky’s precise ability to describe continuous feelings of abandonment, loneliness, jealousy, and desperation alongside desire, awe, euphoria, curiosity, and lust situate the familiar and relatable unstable relationship-based material in a way that intends to try to unpack it from within. Rather than simply show a heart-ached misfit acting out and letting whoever else comes alone pick up the pieces, it is very clear this narrator cares, which in turns makes her so much more vulnerable, to the point that living her life feels like walking a tightrope over a chasm without a net.

Like Ernaux often does so well, the narration, even while depicting a young person we wish we could protect from their own (perhaps intentional) naïveté, speaks with an authority that makes getting in the way of what she wants or feels come secondhand. “When I wrote about you, it felt fake,” the narrator states. “My emotions hid behind a wall of superficiality, as if covered in plastic. I wanted to tear through to the center of feeling—the core of myself, my heart, or whatever it is that harbors all this tumult—but I couldn’t reach it.” While many lesser narratives might rely on the shock or sting of seeing a female in obvious distress be taken advantage of, here instead the benefit of retrospect and lived experience illuminate the otherwise probably toxic experiences with burgeoning foresight, letting us latch on to the narrator and live alongside her to some extent, without having to feel completely thrown to the wolves. Her desire, too, to embody and inflect substance onto experience—often through relating it to music and other texts—provides something more than mere navel-gazing and exploitation of one’s own pain, making it read like a page-turner, as narcotic as much as holistic. It feels like a controlled chaos—capable of breaking down at any time and delving deep into the brutal panging of one’s heart, but also strangely satisfying for the lack of lockdown judgment, fueled a logical abandon that thins the line between desire and reality line by line.

This isn’t to say, however, that Pregaming Grief is simply the story of a young woman lost in the throes of seeking love and growing up. As the narrator regularly drinks to blackout, makes messes of herself in public, and offers faith to older men who don’t deserve it, the underlying thrust of being young in a world without clear guardrails provides an almost ritualistic sense of personal spectacle that feeds the reader while it should probably also make them sick. “When you thrashed your body with such ferocity, fear filled me,” the narrator states. “Male pain has so often been a weapon I thought might kill me. I’m a dartboard for men and the things that deeply disturb them.” Once again, nothing that she does—going on road trips, frequenting dating apps, chugging wine, trying to write—would seem to help alleviate the romantic loss with which this book begins, and yet her continuous refusal to slow down, despite the violence that awaits her, fills us with a guiding hope for restoration that continues to be met with an even deeper deficit between.

We feel greatly for the narrator’s ambition, her drive to be seen and respected as a person and an artist, to put herself in harm’s way as if knowing that only through exposure will she ever find something of her own, and yet we totally understand, and maybe even appreciate, her unwillingness to settle back, as behind glass. The lack of any real safe haven—her family is all but absent besides irregular mentions of her violent brother and dead father, and even her closest friends are more so partners in crime than sources of truth—underlines the book’s pathological willingness to take life as it is; to want to see not merely mirrors and totems, even in hunger, but to refuse to settle for the benign; to be willing to risk it all in exchange for a true moment, even as it pushes her toward the brink of death, and even the moments that do arrive never linger for very long.

Where other similar narrators might seem to know and not care, content to wallow in misery as an exhibition, Pregaming Grief would seem to know more than it lets on, if in a way that offers no clear out or resolution besides the fact that she continues not only to survive, but to desire; no holds barred but tapping out. It reminds me that among the best effects of autofiction is this inherent lack of varnish; how it doesn’t need to force its sequences to congeal or cohere but allows a simulation of the life of both the body and the mind. In a time when so much “realism” is based on cookies and receipts, it’s refreshing to be given space in a partition that reflects on—and even challenges—its own experience as substance as an essential part of processing the conceit of being alive.