https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/11/exquisite-cadavers-by-meena-kandasamy-review

A short, spiky novella about identity and belonging plays with the boundaries between ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’

In a lecture published in the essay collection Feel Free, Zadie Smith remembers the moment she began to write fiction in the first person. It was a revelation. The “I” had such an immediate “reality effect”, she writes: no longer was it so necessary to build, painstakingly, the “reality” of a third-person world – the “I” cut through at once, and the reader was away.

In autofiction, this power is only intensified. How much is factual (for that has its own deep power also, as every memoirist knows)? How much is not? How unsettled does the reader therefore feel? And how much is in the gift of the author – that is, who gets to call it fiction at all? The Indian poet, novelist and activist Meena Kandasamy, bruised by the reception of When I Hit You, an autofictional account of her own short and abusive first marriage, argues that it all depends on who you are and especially where you are from. “To a Western audience,” she writes in the margins of her new novella, Exquisite Cadavers: