Through literature’s continual search to share the human experience and form interpersonal connections across identities, the autobiographical form has emerged as a way for authors to communicate subjective reality to a new audience. This form allows literature to bridge the gap between individual identity and shared experiences. There is one key reason for this: though we view autobiography as true, it doesn’t follow that it is universally convincing.

In media, universality is the presentation of relatability as both universal experience and universal understanding. We hold ourselves to believe that this is based on an exposition of truth. Through social and political media, experience and understanding have become dependent on an appeal to the mass population, and those to whom it does not apply, in dissatisfaction or disbelief, say that it is not real, or not fully real. This reinforcement of universality has framed it as concurrent to the truth: any ‘real’ experience or understanding must apply to everyone. This, needless to say, is false. What we desire is not reality, but conviction: in media we search for experiences and understandings that align with our current experiences and understandings, convincing us of a universal truth of the human condition. Relatability has become warped through its increasingly global reach: something is no longer relatable to a specific audience, but rather to an indistinguishable body. This makes conviction on a mass scale near impossible, and instead, we frame it as a search for reality. What the reader really desires is to immerse themselves in a text, to experience it convincingly and as such, expose themselves to worlds they would not otherwise get to partake in. This is the value of the fictionalisation of autobiography: the concurrence of truth provides a base expectation of relatability and conviction, and the proper manipulation of that truth allows authors to curate the experiences that are shared with the reader.

Pushing the epistemic boundaries of autobiographical forms highlights the importance of individual reality, as the overlapping expectations of truth and emotional reaction reframe how we interact with the authors’ experience through literature. By leaving the “reality” of an experience ambiguous, autobiographical texts can explore how the concept of a universal truth bars emotional understanding, because when confronted by ambiguous “reality,” we allow ourselves to believe in true events which we find unbelievable, and question what we originally believe is normal. We open ourselves to relate to something that is not universally true because we have no attachment to its truth factor: we are no longer dependent on relatability. Only when we are open to an unrealistic reality are we able to cross the barriers of communication that are formed in the belief of universal truth, and through this, gain a deeper understanding of the unique experience of being human.