All fiction is to some extent autobiographical in that it contains elements of the author’s own feelings, experience, obsessions. But no fiction can be memoir, even though memoir is also the careful shaping of that same personal experience. The difference is simple: Memoir is about real people, and the characters in novels, even realist novels, are imaginary. No matter how closely a novel hews to the author’s own life and experience, the imagination lifts a realist novel into the same realm as fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, and epic tales of gods and heroes. I don’t believe in autofiction or genre. It’s all stories: Outline inhabits the same ecosystem as The Hobbit, which shares a planet with Fear of Flying and The Iliad and Stranger in a Strange Land and Outlander and Jude the Obscure, and so on and so forth.