Thinking (Im)Possibilities: Cognitive Acts of Imagination and Autofictional Books

Abstract

Autofiction often interweaves the (phenomenologically) real and the unreal. It is definitionally in some way about the author as a real-life person but also frequently features elements that are impossible by real-life standards, or at least seem highly unlikely. This article argues that autofiction provides a training ground for imaginative acts and has the potential to change our understanding of what is possible, not only in literature but also in life. This article substantiates this hypothesis by integrating models from Text World Theory, Unnatural Narratology, and a Predictive-Processing account of reading, as well as neuroscientific research on the default mode network and on literary writing and reading. The article finally draws on reader responses from the platform “Goodreads” as tentative evidence for how autofictional texts affect intuitions about the (im)possible.

1. Introduction

In 10:04, a book written by Ben Lerner and proclaiming itself “novel” on the cover, several events are first narrated and subsequently reported to not have taken place. For example, the first-person narrator, unnamed but for one instance in which he is referred to as “Ben” and is closely modeled on the real-life Ben Lerner, remarks, “I do remember the drive, the view, stroking Liza’s hair, the incommunicable beauty destined to disappear. I remember it, which means it never happened” (Lerner 2014, p. 81). In another instance, the narrator tells of how he runs first up and then down the stairs to get to a woman on the opposite platform and states, “I reached her, which meant it never happened” (p. 210). 10:04 moreover includes impossible jumps between fictional and real world. In a section in the middle of the book, in which the narrator of the framing parts refers to himself in the third person as “the author”, this entity is away for the weekend with family. His brother asks, “Where’s Ari? Did she go to bed already or is she coming?” (Ariana is the first name of the real Ben Lerner’s wife.) The reply is, “She isn’t in this story”, but it remains a mystery why this is so. The narrator or character—it is impossible to tell which of them and wherein exactly the difference lies1—muses that “if he knew how to explain it she would be walking toward them now, not Hannah”, and, deducing another impossibility, states, “I’ve divided myself into two people. A cut across worlds” (p. 78).

We know of course that anything can happen in a work of fiction. We know that the rules of the real world (in terms of temporal sequence, laws of non-contradiction, laws of gravity, etc.) may be suspended. But 10:04 is not straightforwardly, or not exclusively, fiction. It is in addition autobiographical, albeit also not straightforwardly so. It belongs to the currently very popular genre of autofiction, which, for the purpose of this article, can be understood as follows. Autofictional texts signal both their autobiographical and their fictional qualities and extend an invitation to a combination of, or oscillation between, autobiographical and fictional reading modes.2 There is certainly autofiction that remains strictly within the bounds of real-world laws of probability, but autofictional texts also often include blatant (im)possibilities of various kinds. Selves, in autofictional texts, split and multiply, traverse ontological levels, and travel across time. They narrate their own death or afterlife and live counterfactual lives. Yet, we approach these texts in part for insights into a real person and their, as well as our own, real-world context. Through its (im)possibilities, this article proposes, autofiction asks us to rethink, and invites us to experience differently, what is experienced as real and unreal, possible and impossible. Autofiction performs, comments on, and often takes to new levels everyday imaginative and creative acts of cognition involved in acts of meaning-making, perception, and remembering. Autofiction, this article argues, thus provides a training ground for imaginative acts that go beyond everyday cognition and therefore has the potential to change our experience of what is real and possible, not only in literature but also in life.

In the context of this potential of autofiction, it is worth noting that autofictional modes have often been employed by those marginalized through prevalent generic and social conventions. This is apparent already in one of the earlier reflections on the term and concept of autofiction, as put forward by Serge Doubrovsky, who understands autofiction as something available for “nobodies”, while autobiography, he feels, is reserved only for “somebodies” (Doubrovsky 2001, p. 104; see also Dix 2018, p. 3; Effe and Lawlor 2025, p. 145). The emancipatory potential of autofiction for marginalized groups is apparent also in Frank Zipfel’s comment that autofictional narrative “allows for the creative reconfiguration of minority identities” (Zipfel 2005, p. 37) and in his observation that the practice is common amongst women, Jews, and homosexuals (Zipfel 2009, p. 36). The discussion of autofiction in criticism of the past decades moreover shows that the transgressive and liberatory potential of autofiction in contexts of marginalization and oppression is increasingly recognized (see Effe and Lawlor 2025, p. 146). While 10:04, which will serve as this article’s case study, is written by a white male heterosexual author and thus originates in a different position, the book nonetheless allows seeing the potentials that autofictional negotiations of what is possible and likely can have also in other contexts.

To signal the potential of autofiction for changing our intuitions about what is impossible and what is possible, this article speaks of (im)possibilities with the prefix set in brackets. In what follows, the hypothesis that autofiction has such a potential is substantiated through an interdisciplinary combination of narrative-based, neuroscientific–psychological, and phenomenologically oriented approaches to meaning-making in acts of reading and in everyday cognitive acts. This article integrates theories and models about textual processing from narrative theory and linguistics with insights from neuroscience and psychology in order to describe the cognitive mechanisms at play in readers’ processing of by real-world standards impossible character configurations, plot structures, and events. Section 2 discusses three approaches in narrative theory—Text World Theory, Unnatural Narratology, and Predictive Processing—that conceptualize reading as a combination of real-world frames and experiences, on the one side, and textual input, on the other. While it is not an explicit claim in any of these accounts, this article will argue that they invite the conjecture that engagements with fictional, and even more with autofictional, (im)possibilities have the potential to lead to transformations in our real-life intuitions about the possible and likely. Section 3 further substantiates the hypothesis about the real-life repercussions of engagement with autofiction by drawing on research on the default mode network, cognitive projection, and the creative qualities of memory. Section 4 closes with an analysis of real-life reader responses indicating that autofiction affects intuitions about the (im)possible in literature and life. These responses by flesh-and-blood readers give impetus, finally, to a reflection on the important role that autofictional challenges to the laws of probability play in negotiating what is deemed real and possible in a given sociocultural context and in individual lives.

2. Encountering (Im)Possibilities in Literature: Text World Theory, Unnatural Narratology, and Predictive-Processing Perspectives

Text World Theory (TWT) is an interdisciplinarily informed account of discourse processing that draws on philosophical, psychological, and cognitive approaches and is interested in syntactical and contextual elements. TWT posits that, in order to understand discourse, we construct subjective mental representations (text-worlds). Linguistic cues, together with the reader’s or listener’s previous knowledge and experiences, provide the material for building such worlds. Text-worlds can be representations of hypothetical, past, future, fictional, or actual states, that is, they can refer to actual or imagined entities and events. Joanna Gavins, as one of the main proponents, explains that we usually take our own experience as starting point, and create text-worlds abiding by the rules of minimal departure. This means that, unless stated otherwise, the text-world is identical with one’s own real-world surroundings—the “discourse world” in TWT terminology or the “actual world”, as it would be referred to in Possible Worlds Theory (Gavins 2007, p. 12). As new information comes in, we adapt our world-model, the content, and the structure of which can “shift and change at any moment” (p. 142). When readers notice mistakes in how a text-world has been constructed, that is, if “inconsistencies or illogicalities” arise, they “repair” their mental world constructs, and, in cases where a repair is not sufficient, a “world-replacement” takes place. This means that readers abandon one world-construct entirely in favor of another.

For autofictional texts, the process is more complicated. For one, when autofictional texts depart from the rules and regularities of the real world—which they often do—this likely involves a cognitive challenge that is absent if a more straightforwardly fictional text does the same. Autofictional texts impose their own rules in discrepancy of those we know from our everyday contexts but simultaneously demand that we continuously draw on real-world knowledge stores, in terms of details about the author’s life and historical contexts as well as general real-world regularities. Departures from these elements therefore pose the challenge that we do not know whether or which textual input demands updating, merely our model of a given text-world and in which cases also our models of the discourse world/actual world must be revised. Secondly, autofictional texts usually do not allow us to simply repair a world construct or even replace it with another. We may initially attribute the appearance of Hannah (rather than Ari) in 10:04 to the narrator’s delusion or fantasizing, which would constitute a world-replacement; we replace what we thought to be a “real” world within the fictional universe with what we now take to be merely a mental dream world created by the narrator or character. Alternatively, we can replace what we perhaps thought to be Lerner’s autobiographical account of his past or present as based on memory with what we now take to be the representation of the author’s hypothetical past, present, or future. In this way, one can explain (away) all autofictional (im)possibilities, namely by interpreting what seems realistically impossible as a fantasy or thought experiment of the author, narrator, or character. Relatedly, we might label Lerner’s narrator unreliable, either due to inaccurate memory and distorted perceptions or owing to the intention to deceive. If we take this road, we encounter difficulties, however, when a text, as autofictional texts tend to do, subsequently stresses that what we have just updated to be a hypothetical world, or coming from a narrator we cannot trust, is actually a representation of the real world and told by someone who shows no signs of trying to mislead us, nor of being particularly badly placed to judge himself and his surroundings. It may work once to replace what we thought to be Lerner’s autobiographical text-world with a text-world that represents either his hypothetical thought experiment or that of a character, but this reading cannot be maintained when the narrator repeatedly tells us that he is writing the book we are reading, namely 10:04, which was written by the real-life Ben Lerner. In summary, in autofictional texts, often neither a world-repair nor a word-replacement is sufficient; autofictional texts instead frequently demand continuous and lasting uncertainty and duality as concerns ontological referentiality.

Unnatural Narratology is interested in literature that features elements in our everyday contexts deemed unrealistic, fantastical, illogical, and impossible.3 In a cognitive approach to such ‘unnaturalness’, Jan Alber describes nine reading strategies that, so he argues, we deploy when we encounter things that cannot be understood with reference to our real-world cognitive frames. Readers may—Alber’s first strategy—blend cognitive frames (Alber 2013, p. 139); doing so creates a new frame in which the previously impossible, say, a dog that is speaking, becomes possible because one has created the frame of the speaking animal.4 If the entity or structure in question is to retain its real-world referentiality, however, which is usually the case in autofiction, such blending is unlikely. This article argues that blending can nonetheless explain our cognitive processing of autofictional (im)possibilities, but that the resulting new cognitive frame is to be conceived of as merged genre expectations (more on this below). Alber’s second strategy—“generification” (p. 141)—means to evoke generic conventions to account for elements that appear unnatural or impossible by real-world standards. Speaking animals, for example, no longer appear impossible to us if we explain their speaking through the fact that we are reading a fable. Analogously, the appearance of Ben Lerner in multiple versions in 10:04 can be explained through conventions of the genre of autofiction. In this way one can easily explain any kind of autofictional (im)possibility, and the same holds true for Alber’s strategy number three: “subjectification” (p. 141). This means to explain an impossibility by situating it within a dream, a fantasy, or a hallucination of the narrator—a strategy that corresponds to what TWT refers to as a world-repair. However, autofiction usually invites us to at the very least contemplate that what we read, even if it is subjective and part of a genre whose conventions allow for departures from reality, nonetheless demands being taken seriously in, and related to, real-world frames, experiences, and knowledge stores. These demands complicate strategies of subjectification and generification, which would not do these invitations of autofiction justice. Strategies four, five, and six—foregrounding the thematic, reading allegorically, and satirization (pp. 142–43)—can all be deployed in reading autofictional texts, but autofictional texts also usually ask us to entertain the possibility that their metaphors and illustrations can be taken more literally. We can read the splitting of Lerner’s narrator as a commentary on self-performance in a contemporary selfie culture and as taking to the extreme everyday discrepancies between different versions of the self performed in different contexts and for different audiences, but 10:04 does not leave it at that. Alber’s eighth strategy is called “Do it Yourself” (p. 144) and means to understand logical incompatibilities as an invitation to choose the storyline we prefer or to create our own stories from it. This is a theoretical possibility in reading autofictional texts, but, since a prominent characteristic found in many autofictional works is that they make it difficult for readers to sustain one mode of reading, be it a purely autobiographical one or a purely fictional one, much autofiction prevents such naturalization. Lastly, strategy number nine—the Zen Way of Reading (pp. 144–45)—means to stoically accept the unnatural. While this article in fact proposes that the acceptance of autofictional (im)possibilities can be the outcome of our encounter with the text, the process is conceived of as a cognitive transformation of a kind that can involve changes in what we experience as real and deem possible rather than Zen indifference to a text’s (seeming) impossibilities.

In summary, it may be possible to eliminate the surprising, defamiliarizing, and challenging effects of autofictional (im)possibilities through one or more of Alber’s nine reading strategies, and some readers probably do so. However, many works of autofiction work against such naturalizing, and in this, as this article argues, lies their transformative potential. To better understand the cognitive processes at play in the cognitive transformations autofiction can effect, we turn to Predictive Processing as an additional framework that allows for the conceptualization of what takes place in the reading process when one encounters something that is—or appears—unnatural, impossible, or at least highly unlikely.

Predictive-Processing theories stem originally from philosophy, psychology, and neurosciences, where they do work in explaining diverse brain functions, including perception, emotion, action, and cognition. The framework has more recently been applied also to acts of reading and writing. In Predictive-Processing accounts of cognition, our actions are explained as based on probabilistic estimations of what we deem likely to happen. These estimations, in turn, are based on mental representations of ourselves and the world around us, in which we run mental simulations of, for example, an action and its effects that are then evaluated against actual experience.5 In a continuous feedback loop, we update and improve our probability estimations in response to sensory input from the world around us. Karin Kukkonen elaborates this model of cognition into an account of literary reading. She argues that literary texts have what she refers to as “a probability design that presents prediction errors in a carefully crafted sequence” (Kukkonen 2020, p. 5), and that we continuously form and update expectations about likely story developments based on textual information coming at us as we move along the page. We adjust our estimations about likely plot developments all the time, but when we encounter an (apparent) impossibility or illogicality, larger adjustments are called for. Autofictional texts often constitute an additional challenge for devising adequate probability estimations since the new incoming information is frequently contradicted further on. This likely leads to lasting uncertainty about predictions, thus making it more difficult to establish precision. Autofictional texts make it difficult to define criteria for deciding which information is reliable and to know whether expectations based on real-world knowledge or the conventions of fiction are likely to lead to better results in the sense of more accurate predictions.

We might, for example, start out reading 10:04 as a novel (as the cover and subtitle indeed suggests we do). We might thus read the book as telling the story of an emerging writer. When we learn, in the very first pages, that this writer has been commissioned to write a book, the opening scene of which we have just been reading (Lerner 2014, p. 4), we are invited to adjust our estimations on the basis that we now know the narrator to be the author Ben Lerner or an alter ego of him. As a consequence, we might update our models of possible story developments on the basis of the information we have about Lerner’s career, profession, and family life. We might also update our probability estimations with the new information about genre characteristics we have gained—namely, that 10:04 is a metafictional text commenting on itself, which might lead us to suspect a focus on the process of writing and metaleptic crossings. We may feel confirmed in these newly formed expectations when Lerner’s first novel—Leaving the Atocha Station—is referenced, albeit not by name (pp. 65–66). But, when, a little further on, we learn that it is not Ariana but Hannah walking towards the protagonist, we must again adjust our estimations, since here we are told, in contradiction to what preceded, that our basing our probabilistic model on what we know about the historical Ben Lerner does not lead to correct predictions. The effect of these contradictions is arguably stronger if we engage in a Google search and check details about the historical Lerner’s life, but even without such actions, the text’s commentary on its diversions from a version presented within the book as real is sufficient to create an effect of uncertainty. In summary, contradictory information, which is typical for autofictional texts, poses difficulties for successful probabilistic models.

Our best option, arguably, is to form expectations loosely informed by our knowledge about the real author but not strictly bound by extratextual information—expectations in line with the generic conventions of autofiction in other words. It is in this sense that we can speak of autofictional texts as inviting us to create a blend, namely a generic one. They invite us to combine and in so doing also to modify both our expectations for autobiography and novel. When approaching a text with such a new cognitive frame and the new expectations and probability estimations that come with it, we may now feel quite certain that the text will be full of uncertainties about which elements are based on the real Lerner’s life and which not and about how closely. We may deem it likely also that some tropes of autofiction—based on our knowledge of similar works—will appear in the text, perhaps discussions about the value of art in society and thematization of the boundary between art and life and of its crossing.

A Predictive-Processing model of reading and the accounts given within Unnatural Narrative Theory and TWT are all helpful for understanding how we process and try to make sense of (im)possibilities in autofictional texts, at least in a first instance. Unnatural Narratology and TWT do not accommodate lasting uncertainty, and a combination of, or continuous oscillation between, autobiographical and fictional modes of reading, but can, in combination with a Predictive-Processing framework be developed in this direction (see also Effe 2025, chap. 2). Moreover, all three approaches are compatible with an account of transformative effects beyond the page, as they are the focus of this article, but since none of these theories conceptualizes them in detail, additional developments are necessary to make Predictive-Processing accounts of reading, Unnatural Narratology, and TWT productive for a focus on autofiction’s transformative effects.

Alber stresses that our “reading strategies relate to both our real-world knowledge (acquired through our embodiment—or physical presence—in the world) but also to our literary knowledge (acquired through our exposure to narrative literature)” and that “these types of knowledge are stored in cognitive frames and scripts” (Alber 2013, p. 139). He explains one of the nine reading strategies as transforming these frames and scripts—namely, the creation of cognitive blends. He seems to take it for granted, however, that the newly created cognitive frames are then valid only for the literary text in question. We may, for example, create a frame of speaking animals or of retrogressive temporality (the latter is one of Alber’s examples (p. 140), but we do not believe that animals can speak in real life or that time can move backwards. Within a special issue that aims to create dialog between Unnatural Narratology and Cognitive Literary Studies, Alber, Marco Caracciolo, and Irina Marchesini focus in more detail on the cognitive processes involved in encountering unnatural textual elements. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s tripartite concept of mimesis (consisting of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration)6, they argue that “the unnatural ‘happens’” when there is a significant departure from the real-life schemata we approach the text with (prefiguration), and that we, in the process of configuration—namely, when we make meaning from the text—“address this discrepancy” through interpretative strategies aimed at integrating the unnatural into our everyday reality (Alber et al. 2018, p. 451). They acknowledge that in Ricœur’s understanding of mimesis, “the textually created world is reabsorbed into the real world, potentially reshaping it” (p. 450), and they suggest that “unnatural events [can] bear upon, and potentially enrich, readers’ worldview” (p. 458). Their argument thus invites being developed towards a theory of how the reading process can transform real-world schemata we have at the outset, as Ricoeur’s conception of mimesis indeed implies.7

TWT grants that acts of reading can alter our evaluation of a given text-world’s ontology. Its ontological status, in other words, is not inherent in the text but assigned by readers on the basis of textual cues. As a consequence, whether a given text-world is (evaluated as) hypothetical, fictional, or actual can change over the course of reading as well as between different readers. Alison Gibbons foregrounds this dimension of TWT in an account of how readers come to fictionality judgments. The ontological status of a text-world, she stresses, is “cognitively assigned by readers” (Gibbons 2019, p. 393), which means that it can transform, for example, in response to a world replacement. Moreover, TWT—as does Unnatural Narratology—acknowledges that we draw on our knowledge about and experience of the real world in our interpretation of a text. Gavins names as one of the primary foundations on which TWT is built that “[t]he mental representations through which we understand one another are based not just on the language we use, but on our wider surroundings, our personal knowledge and our previous experiences” (Gavins 2007, p. 6). Moreover, Text World Theory also theorizes how our knowledge and experience of the real world changes in response to a text. Ernestine Lahey notes that the process of world-building comprises a cognitive feedback loop. She explains that information “feeds both into and out of the text-world network” (Lahey 2019, p. 54), namely, first “from the reader’s mind, through the discourse-world into the text-world” and then “back again through the discourse-world and into the mind as subtext, where it can consolidate as new or modified knowledge” (p. 68). In these terms, one can describe also how reading autofiction can modify our intuitions about what is possible and impossible in literature as well as in life—namely, if something intuitively estimated to be impossible but within the text presented as actually taking place leads us to modify our understanding of real-life probabilities.

Kukkonen’s Predictive-Processing account of reading is centrally concerned with how expectations about what is possible—and, within what is deemed possible, about what is more and what less likely—change over the course of reading. While Kukkonen’s original account limits itself to how we adapt our expectations regarding a given text, and to an extent also in respect to other texts, the model is compatible also with this article’s claim that autofiction can make us change our predictions in life more broadly. If we think of reading in terms of Predictive Processing, readers’ personal background is acknowledged as affecting the probability estimates we form. Moreover, Kukkonen argues that the written literary text offers readers “the means to explore inner thoughts,” to an extent guided by the text (Kukkonen 2020, p. 189). She also explicitly mentions that her account “does not preclude using literature as a technology of the self” (p. 191), as is attempted, for example, in therapeutic uses which aim at transforming one’s view of self, world, and likely developments.8 Especially in cases in which our constructions of virtual scenarios, which we need to form probability estimations in the act of reading, tilt into mind-wandering episodes related to one’s personal memories (see Fabry and Kukkonen 2019), it seems plausible that what we deem possible and likely changes not only in regard to a given text but also in respect to life more generally.9 The odds of this happening are arguably even higher if the text is autofictional and therefore explicitly demands drawing on and updating real-world cognitive frames. In this article’s evaluation of reader responses (Section 4), we will see indications of such effects in response to Lerner’s text.

3. Imaginative Projections and Creative Memory: Insights from Psychology and Neuroscience

As a cognitive–stylistic account of language processing, TWT is already an interdisciplinary approach. Unnatural Narratology, too, as we can see in Alber’s account, integrates cognitive science into its approach to literary reading. In both theories, the focus is on processing text, however—on literature in the latter case and on discourse more broadly in the former. This section, in contrast, draws on research in psychology and neuroscience, in most cases not working with texts and readers, to form a yet more interdisciplinary approach to the question of how imaginative acts in engagement with literature compare to and possibly affect those we carry out as part of everyday cognition (see also Effe 2025, chap. 1, 3). Research in these cognitive disciplines, we will see, further substantiates the hypothesis that (im)possibilities in literature have transformative potential beyond the reading process itself. Psychological, including neuroscientific, research on autobiographical memory and on the default mode network serves to, first, establish commonalities between imaginative acts in reading and in everyday cognition and, in a second step, form hypotheses about how acts of reading (and also writing, although the latter is not the focus of this article) might affect how we perceive and orient ourselves in the present, how we remember the past, and how we imagine and plan for the future.

Research on autobiographical memory has in recent decades shown that what we remember is far from accurate and purposefully so. An earlier understanding of memory as encoding, storage, and retrieval has given way to the acknowledgement that our autobiographical memories and with them our understanding of ourselves change constantly. Daniel L. Schacter, in The Seven Sins of Memory (Schacter 2001; see also Schacter 1999), argues that memory’s inaccuracy and flexibility are adaptive advantages. Together with others, he refers to “the prospective brain” to express that memory functions prominently not to reminisce about the past but to project into the future and stresses that distortions and abstractions are crucial (see Schacter et al. 2007; Schacter and Addis 2007; Szpunar et al. 2013). Studies on reconsolidation confirm these claims—namely, by showing that each time we recall a memory it is subject to change (see Sara 2000; Nader et al. 2000). This new understanding of the morphing quality and creative tasks of memory is promoted also by the cognitive neuroscientist Robert Stickgold, who studies meaning-making, to be understood as a process of integrating new experiences into existing memory networks. We do so, Stickgold stresses, in order to form “an enhanced context from within which preexisting information can better inform future action” (Stickgold 2011, p. 77), and we are particularly good at this, as he has shown in a specific dreaming state—namely, when, as characteristic of the REM sleep phase, the brain’s neuromodulation pattern renders connecting threads between neurons as well as between brain networks looser than in waking states. The pattern of high acetylcholine levels and low norepinephrine and serotonin levels that characterizes this sleep phase, Stickgold argues, facilitates forming new relationships between neurons within a given network as well as new links between networks (Stickgold 1999, 2003, 2011).

Neuroscientific exploration of brain structures and brain activation patterns shows that cognitively there is very little to no difference in terms of whether we recall a past episode in our life, whether we think about the future, or whether we construct a counterfactual scenario. Research on what has been labeled the “default mode network”, referred to as such because it is the brain’s activity pattern when no specific task is being performed—active, in other words, when we are in a mental state of resting and often recorded when subjects are waiting for instructions during an experiment—shows that the same areas of the brain are active in past, future, and hypothetical projections (see Buckner and Carroll 2007; Buckner et al. 2008; Raichle 2015; Raichle and Snyder 2007; Spreng et al. 2009). The default mode network is argued to also support the cognitive projections involved in imaginatively engaging with literary fiction. Alan Richardson stresses that projecting into fictional worlds and into characters’ perspectives is very similar to acts of self-projection into past, future, and hypothetical scenarios (Richardson 2011a, p. 672; 2011b, p. 235). He argues that it would therefore be “uneconomical to posit separate cognitive systems for modeling the future and for creating fictions” (Richardson 2011a, p. 676). Empirical research suggests that his suspicion is on the right track. An fMRI study identified areas linked to the default mode network and thus to “memory retrieval, semantic integration, free association, and spontaneous cognition” as involved also during creative writing (Shah et al. 2013, pp. 1097, 1095).10 While it does not inevitably follow that the same holds for reading, it is plausible. Based on a quantitative meta-analysis and with reference to a review of studies on story-processing (Mar 2004), Nathan R. Spreng, Raymond A. Mar, and Alice S. N. Kim indeed list “engagement with narrative fiction” as a domain for which the default mode network is responsible (Spreng et al. 2009, p. 501). It is noteworthy also that the brain activation patterns of the default mode network are similar to those that Stickgold has measured in the sleep phase conducive to creative memory work (Stickgold 2011, p. 91).

Together, these arguments and findings suggest that the same brain areas are responsible for engagement with fiction, hypothetical thinking, autobiographical memory, and creative meaning-making (the latter entailing a form of memory transformation). Since the same brain areas are involved, it is likely also that these activities cross-influence one another; in other words, reading fiction, and perhaps the more autofiction, has the potential to change our understanding of ourselves as we engage with and orientate ourselves in our immediate surroundings, as we remember and relate to our past, and as we imagine the future. The work of psychologists Elizabeth J. Marsh and Brenda W. Yang (Marsh and Yang 2020) points in a similar direction. They suggest that autobiographical memory might be productively understood as including also the recall of events from a novel or a fictional film. Yang and colleagues (Yang et al. 2022) have subsequently compared memories from fiction with memories from personal life by evaluating phenomenological qualities of recall. Their study showed that these are strikingly similar, allowing the authors to conclude that memories from fiction appear to be “products of the same underlying system as prototypical autobiographical memories”, that memories from fiction “[exhibit] similar properties and functions” as autobiographical ones, and that the former possibly also have “downstream effects on judgments and behaviors” (p. 1103).

In summary, research on the morphing and creative workings of memory, on the brain areas involved in different kinds of cognitive projections, and on similarities in acts of imagination in engagement with literature (including fiction) and everyday cognition suggests that reading can transform not only the cognitive frames we employ in processing texts but also those at play in how we orient ourselves in the world. The above discussed body of work from a range of disciplines in the cognitive sciences suggests, in other words, that texts can change our intuition about what is possible, what is impossible, what is probable, and what is unlikely not only in literature but also in life. This is not a new insight of course. Stories—both fictional and factual—have always been known to change the attitudes and beliefs of their audiences. In the history of reading, novels have been chastised for corrupting readers’ emotions, for example, or promoted for facilitating their moral development, and propagandistic narratives are based on the assumption that they will alter the outlook of those they target. This article proposes that the combination of factual–autobiographical and fictional modes comes with particular potentials to transform the way their readers think and feel that have hitherto gone unrecognized. We will now turn to a consideration, at the theoretical level, of why autofiction may have particularly powerful transformative potentials and look also at empirical responses from flesh-and-blood readers indicating that, in their engagement with Lerner’s 10:04, they experienced such effects.

4. Expanding the Sense of the Possible

More traditionally fictional and more clearly factual texts can also change our way of understanding the world of course. Yet, in autofictional texts, the potential for more profound cognitive transformation is arguably stronger. This is so since these kinds of text often diverge from our real-world concepts while at the same time demanding that we strongly draw on and draw inferences about the authors’ and our own real-world context. Since autofictional texts frequently show our probability estimations as derived based on real-world experience and cognitive frames to be inaccurate but nonetheless tell us that applying these frames is the right thing to do, such texts ask us to revise our predictions in respect to everyday life as well as regarding the text at hand. If, as is often the case, autofictional texts create lasting uncertainty about what is actual, what is imaginary or invented, and what is hypothetical, they, in consequence, likely expand our sense of the possible in a given text as well as in everyday life.

The argument is not that we will deem any kind of fantastical occurrence possible if we only read about it enough or that we change our cognitive frames to a larger extent the more impossible a narrative. The transformative power of fiction depends on the fact that it stays close to life too. Autofictional texts evoke what Philippe Lejeune has influentially termed the autobiographical and referential pact, roughly paraphrased as the promise to tell the truth as well as possible and as one remembers it (Lejeune 1989, pp. 5, 22), but they do not fully, or not exclusively, subscribe to this pact. They also draw a fictional pact, which means to signal that the text creatively departs from the truth, including from the subjective truth the author remembers, and to demand of readers to approach the text also as a work of art for indirect truths and aesthetic pleasure rather than exclusively referentially. It is because of the expectations autofictional texts set up and then refute and because they invite us to draw extensively on our knowledge and cognitive frames from real life but then do not confirm the probability estimations we form on their basis that their (im)possibilities are likely to hold powerful transformative potential.

The process of cognitive transformation that autofiction facilitates can be described as follows: If a text successfully leads us to form estimations of likely developments on the basis of real-world frames and to accord these estimations high probability, unexpected failure to conform will lead us to revise our estimations or at least to become less certain about their probability. If we nonetheless believe the text to retain real-world relevance and continue to deem cognitive frames acquired and applied in everyday contexts to be pertinent, we will likely revise our expectations not only about the text but also about real life. Consequently, we potentially start to conceive of what previously appeared as an impossibility as within the realm of the possible. In creating such effects, autofiction makes use of the fact that acts of imagination in everyday thinking share neuronal structures and cognitive frames with acts of imagination in reading fiction and of the fact that the ‘fiction’ element of autofiction allows for more creative and imaginative freedoms in cognitive–affective acts facilitated by autofictional texts than most of us allow ourselves, or are capable of, in everyday life.

One might say that an autofictional text like 10:04 merely acknowledges and draws attention to the fact that phenomenologically, the line between what is actual, what is hypothetical, and what is fictional is not always clear-cut. Yet, in foregrounding this seemingly basic fact, this autofictional book raises fundamental questions about cognition—namely, about the role played by cognitive–affective acts of imagination in perception, memory, and future thinking. Describing how one, from a TWT perspective, mentally elaborates text-worlds in response to the text, Gavins claims, “I am […] able to recognise the differences between my experiences of the real world and the worlds I create in my mind. I have a definite sense of what is real and what is not, what is possible and what is not” (Gavins 2007, p. 13). Research on creative memory work and on brain activation patterns during cognitive projections in thinking about past and future, actual and hypothetical scenarios, as well as in engagement with fiction, suggests otherwise, however, and so does much autofiction. In autofictional texts, we frequently find fluid and uncertain boundaries between worlds, which often also means between the voices of author, narrator(s), and character(s). Whether a world is hypothetical or actual; whether something is real, a memory, a wish, or a fantasy; and how all these categories relate to the worlds of fictional creation, is often far from clear and stable in such literature and to an extent also phenomenologically in real life. By asking us to reconsider the relation between what we imagine; what we write, read, and talk about; and what is, as well as whether we can always clearly distinguish between these categories, such autofictional texts also ask us to rethink our conceptions of the possible and the impossible.

A selection of reader responses from people who comment on their experience of engaging with Lerner’s 10:04 on the social cataloging and reviewing site “Goodreads”, while not constituting statistically relevant proof, suggests that autofiction might have this potential to expand our conception of the possible. The dataset stem from a qualitative analysis of a corpus of the first 100 English-language reviews displayed when sorting from newest (stemming from 16 August 2021) to oldest (24 January 2020).11 10:04, as this data suggests, leads several readers to reevaluate what is real, what is unreal, what is possible, and what is impossible not only in fiction but also in life. Reader36, for example, starts to reflect on “multiple futures with the passage of time” as well as on “fiction vs. reality”. Reader26 takes such musings into account in a consideration of their own life, commenting, “Time can be mutable, especially in fiction”, and goes on to remark that “[h]ow we perceive time in our own stories can be pretty mutable too”. Reader64 comes to the realization that “‘real life’” is best put in scare quotes and starts to question whether this contestable category is “more real than the imagined versions of it that we tell ourselves or write for our ‘publishers’”. This reader, one might say, starts to acknowledge that we reimagine and reinvent ourselves continuously also in everyday life and that differences between imagination and reality thus become difficult to draw. Reader84, to give a final example, reports on the effect of her act of reading as “an unsettled sense of reality” and stresses that she is “grateful” for this ambiguity. It helped her, she comments, “in [her] own life as [she] reckon[s] with a lack of future clarity”. These quotes, being relatively few in numbers and collected from existing comments rather than the result of phenomenological interviews, can certainly not constitute statistically valid verification or falsification of this article’s hypothesis about the transformative potentials of autofictional texts and modes of reading. We must keep in mind also that the comments evaluated stem from a platform where readers create a publicly visible account of their reading experiences and may wish to present themselves as a certain kind of reader to others. Future research might be able to gather more conclusive results through phenomenological interviews on a larger group of readers, reading a range of autofictional texts, perhaps in comparison to a control group engaging with texts more uncomplicatedly fictional or autobiographical. However, statistically valid data would be difficult to gain also from this kind of study since to work with literature inevitably means to work with texts that are ultimately unique in their combination of content and style, so that a conclusive causal relation between form and effect would be very difficult to establish. In addition, the tolerance for illogicality is individually different, so that variation in terms of whether or to what extent a given text changes a reader’s probability estimations must be recognized to depend not only on the text in question but also on personality traits. What the small and methodologically limited case study presented in this article can modestly claim is that, for the autofictional text analyzed and for a range of individual readers, the hypothesis about autofiction’s transformative potentials seems to be going in the right direction.

It is important to, at the end of this article, stress that imaginative experiments with reality, as they take place in many works of autofiction, are not a good in themselves, as autofictional texts indeed often foreground. Imaginative acts can, however, as autofiction often shows, too, and as is the case also in 10:04, be a powerful tool for revisiting and newly envisioning identities, communities, and ways of being in our contemporary world. In proposing routes from perception, imagination, and telling to being, a text like 10:04 invites us to more creatively engage with our autobiographical memories and with our individual and collective visions of the future. This text, in summary, exemplifies autofiction that asks us to reconsider what is possible and to entertain the idea that imagining alternatives can have manifest real-life effects.