As a matter of principle, I’m against psychobabble. Even when I know what I’m talking about, I don’t want to sound like an expert. It feels fake, pretentious—everything I detest. If my con artist sister and I are alike in any way, it’s that we’re collaborators. She once lifted a restaurant concept wholesale. So yeah, the chop, chop, let’s put on a show impulse comes straight out of our shared DNA. But I digress.

As an LMFT, I haven’t written an academic essay in over thirty years, except for a bunch of Seven Steops articles I wrote almost a decade ago. Academic writing always felt like a performance of authority, one voice sealed off from correction. Besides, I was in college for so long I still have realistic nightmares about somehow missing some major requirement and not graduating. It’s been decades. I assume this happens to everyone.

Lately, though, as I go on podcasts to promote my book, the same question keeps coming up: Why autofiction? Why not memoir? Sometimes there’s an assumption that I’m hiding—changing names, protecting myself. Sometimes the interviewer genuinely wants to know. And despite myself, I start thinking about the different therapies I’ve been trained in.

Before I know it, the beginnings of an essay start forming in my head. Narrative therapy, for instance, is built around the idea that people are the authors of their own lives—that through collaboration, new and more workable stories can be created. The resemblance to autofiction isn’t accidental. But what gets left out of that tidy explanation is how little of this can be done by oneself.