Every season, there’s a particular sort of novel that elicits its own genre of disdain. It’s somehow “too personal” and also lacking in “depth.” It’s called things like indulgent, trashy, lazy, artless, frivolous, embarrassing, or perhaps just very online. This is the mauvais genre of our times, the gimmick of the not-quite-memoir, autofiction. Over the summer, as Rachel Cusk’s Life of M: A Novel took its turn, Grace Byron remarked that by now, speculation over the genre’s boundaries of fact and fiction is “its own bloodsport.” Since its rise in the 2010s, “the only thing trendier and triter than writing autofiction is hating autofiction,” as Sanjena Sathian put it in 2022. But why, if it is so silly and unserious, does this genre seem to pose such an enduring threat?
To perennial debates over autofiction and much else, Sarah Brouillette’s latest book Content Machines is a welcome redirection from questions of literary merit to a sharp historical analysis of the contemporary publishing industry—and many of its attendant anxieties. Brouillette, a literary scholar and Marxist-feminist whose cultural criticism has appeared in Defector, continues the interventionary work of her previous books on UNESCO, the creative economy, and the global literary marketplace, regarding contemporary questions about the “fate of the literary”: "We are told to worry about the threats to literary art’s essential moral seriousness, distinction, difficulty, and purpose," as she writes in Content Machines. "We are warned that publishing today is overrun with what are basically entitled consumers: ideologically inflexible, uncomfortable with hard ideas and disagreement, untrained, incapable of nuanced thought, and always on the edge of tears or outage." Rather than stoking the panic, Content Machines historically situates it, uncovering urgent political questions about an era of publishing permeated by digital platforms such as Wattpad, Kindle, and Audible, and social media phenomena like BookTok and Bookstagram.
Content Machines examines digital platforms as “technologies of precarity,” instrumental to the ever-worsening labor conditions in publishing. More specifically, Brouillette conceives of platforms as forces of feminization. It’s not just that women are doing more of the jobs and that the jobs are getting worse. Women are doing more of these jobs precisely because they are worse. “The more work in writing and publishing becomes available only to those willing to do it on a contingent basis,” as Brouillette explains, “the more it is likely to be women doing it,” as workers accustomed “to low-prestige work and to taking jobs that allow them to continue with housework and childcare.” This is the case across many workforces, and what we’re always really talking about whenever masculinity is in “crisis.”
Of course, there are other versions of this story about feminization, like the one about how women now supposedly dominate the industry, not only pushing out men but the masculinist prestige that once constituted the literary. An industry that once produced the likes of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen now produces an endless stream of genre fiction and self-help. Or here's another version: Male novelists “vanished” from contemporary literature because women read more than men. In his self-published essay “From Misogyny to No Man’s Land,” which had a viral moment in 2024, Ross Barkan insists these are all signs of the shrinking “interiority of men.” Dismissing the “gripes of educated women on the state of the American male,” Barkan makes a case for men to return to writing their novels, a timeless masculinist endeavor: “Novels offer ambition on a range not plausible in the land of screens because there is no budget required, no gimmick or technological mastery—it is raw imagination, the greatest achievement of humankind.” Barkan, who more recently found himself at the center of a plagiarism scandal at New York magazine, begs the question. What’s stopping all these men from writing their novels and achieving greatness? Perhaps they’re waiting for permission.
Cast as premonitions of “postliteracy,” the boom of specific (yes, girl-coded) genres like autofiction and personal essays, Young Adult fiction, romance and romantasy reflects an aesthetic shift deeply entangled in the feminization of publishing and digital platforms. Here, as Brouillette reminds us, the association between “gendered nonwork, presumed to be effortless and ‘natural,’ and nonelite sentimental narrative genres such as romance fiction” is difficult to overstate. Above all, the romance and YA niches of publishing are where the most unpaid and badly paid jobs can be found, and where there’s the most uneven representation of women workers. Writers in these genres do most of their own marketing, often unpaid and without the prospect of any advance, and primarily on digital platforms. This involves the ongoing activity of building and maintaining an online authorial/writerly persona through social media posts on multiple platforms, podcast and webcast appearances, making content for blogs and Substack and Patreon, and so on. As in feminized relations of care, writers of the platform era are conditioned to imagine their labor as a matter of love and aspiration—making it not just (or probably not at all) a means of getting paid. But even if you can see through this romanticized work ethic, it doesn’t make platform work any less exhausting for writers whose creative output and livelihood are bound up in it, and presumably several other jobs.
Like Anna Kornbluh’s highly influential 2024 book Immediacy, Content Machines seeks to historicize contemporary autofiction and its modes of self-narration. For Kornbluh, autofiction is the ultimate literary aesthetic of immediacy, indicative of “a new hegemony” of first-person narration. She describes autofiction as antifiction, a style “not made but just extant,” jettisoning literary mediation and putting fictionality itself “under erasure.” As Kornbluh puts it: “Rather than building character, [autofictions] advance a protagonist who is the same as the author in name and circumstance and real friends and real family and, above all, real voice. Rather than narrativity and plot, they purvey first-person present-tense uneventful short-spans, just elliptical ruminations in real time.” Where Kornbluh derides an “era of narcissism,” Brouillette locates the constraints of the writer as feminized digital culture worker, reading autofiction—along with confessionalism and trauma narratives—as some of the dominant “gendered compulsions” of platform labor. Among these compulsions is a political problem at the center of Content Machines. It is the idea, which platform labor and autofiction hold in common, that “everyone has a story to tell,” the sheer purpose of which is to extract and circulate content to attract more users.
Many of the highlights of Content Machines come when Brouillette engages with texts that aren’t taken seriously as “literature” (and perhaps refuse to be), where she brings the politics of contemporary longings for the literary into stark relief. These texts range from self-published bibliotherapy on Wattpad (including but not exclusive to self-help), the “denigrated genres” of romance and YA, audiobooks, and may very well include media you care about (that may perhaps be in “bad taste”).
I was most impressed by Brouillette’s reading of Marie Calloway’s 2013 collection what purpose did i serve in your life, a masterclass in the critical reassessment of a controversial text. A year before what purpose did i serve in your life was published, Calloway became an internet microcelebrity (and object of considerable ridicule) when her short story “Adrien Brody” scandalized New York literary scenes. Based on a series of since-deleted Tumblr posts, “Adrien Brody” had nothing to do with the actor but was widely read as a pseudonymous account of an online relationship turned sexual encounter with Rob Horning, editor of the New Inquiry. While the shitstorm may have settled, it won’t be forgotten. But what purpose did i serve in your life is also a fascinating text: a mélange of fiction, memoir, stories of sex work and online work, selfies, screenshots, and collage. Brouillette understands it as a “mostly tragic” story, chronicling a young woman’s attempts “to play the game of the flexible, agile cultural worker, networking and establishing the right connections, yet its ultimate concern is how exhausting and risky it is for someone in her position to live like that.” The text unfolds, as Brouillette puts it, as both debut and swan song—by now a testament to why Calloway dropped out of her literary career three years later.
When what purpose did i serve in your life was published in 2013, many were primed to hate it. Back then, a lot of the discourse happened on Facebook, where Calloway was a notorious presence. There were also caustic reviews like this one from Elizabeth Spiers: “If [Calloway] keeps at it, learns more about craft, stops worrying so much about how other people react to her, gets out of her own head enough to develop the sort of empathy needed to write characters with depth and texture, becomes more ambitious in the themes she is exploring, learns how to be edited and how to find editors who will make her work better in every respect… then perhaps writing, and not sex, really will be her best thing.” Again, the tropes of this disdain seem noteworthy: the emphasis on craftlessness, performativity and self-awareness, and the lack of depth, empathy, or ambition. These are, likewise, traits ascribed to autofiction as an object of immediacy—in Kornbluh’s words, a hyper-personalized style of writing “increasingly fused in an amorphous bustle,” whose metric is not the chapter but “the run-on sentence.”
By contrast, Brouillette reads Calloway’s auto-authorial persona as a figure of refusal in the early platform era, a writer “who does not want to win, because she has started to see the rules of the game and instead wants to reveal them as clearly as she can.” Rather than flattening the text into the “self-identity without representation” of immediacy, this reading opens up the anti-work inflections of Calloway’s narration. What’s not “literary” about this writing, that is, has to do with how it denaturalizes its own working conditions. Work is felt throughout the prose. Work is imprinted everywhere: in screengrabs about how “women are only getting ‘relevant’ in alt lit because of nudity and talking about fucking completely artlessly”; or the selfie overlaid with “There’s absolutely nothing interesting about this girl. She’s half-conceited, half-insecure, moderately slutty in a dull sort of way, fancies herself to be a writer, yet lacks the talent to produce even a decent grocery list…”
Brouillette counterposes what purpose did i serve in your life against novels like Jordan Castro’s The Novelist, primarily concerned with the serious writer’s resistance to “a new landscape of literary acclaim dominated by a commercial regime of surface appearances.” While The Novelist has a first-person narrator, and even a semi-autobiographical character named Jordan Castro, its claim to “experimental fiction” sets it apart from that gossipy, womanish autofiction. It is a novel, after all, about The Novel: “a commitment to experimental fiction as a kind of moral, even salvific work,” which, as Brouillette correctly observes, must take “the guise of a critique of a feminized cultural tendency” in order to restore the literary. In a context that compels writers to market themselves in ways that can be leveraged by digital platforms, what exactly differentiates autofictional “narcissism” from Castro’s “experimentalism”?
Along with Claire Grossman, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young, Brouillette stands out as one of today’s key scholars of the publishing industry who’s never shown an inclination towards moralizing the literary. Her assessment of publishing may seem bleak, but it is never nihilistic. Nor does it make any claims that in order to be saved from this doomed platform era, the most radical possibility imaginable is somehow the most conservative: a return to discipline, restoring a state of literacy and literary culture only be appreciated from hindsight—the kind of churned-out panic logic that seems to keep the lights on at The Atlantic.
Throughout reading Content Machines, I was reminded of the pleasure of reading a critic read, and of learning to read with them. It wasn’t a nostalgic feeling but a reminder of what criticism can do. While leaving us with questions about what the literary could be, Brouillette points us to the real driver of this panic—not so much a waning of the literary as an immense desire for reading and writing held captive in our daily lives by platform capitalism. Borrowing from the late Joshua Clover, she compels us to look at how platforms capture this desire, contriving ways “to preserve us in the interval” as they merely “pass through us to make more money.” A better experience of the literary may be possible—if only there was the world for it.
