From its opening pages, THE AUTHOR by The Author announces itself as a novel that exists in a constant state of self-examination, blurring the line between reality and fiction, between artistic ambition and self-mythology.
This preoccupation places it squarely in the lineage of contemporary “autofiction”—a tradition in which an author’s real life is transformed into a semi-fictionalized narrative, constantly questioning its own legitimacy. And if there is one book that serves as a lodestar for this style, it is Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station.
First published in 2011, Leaving the Atocha Station follows Adam Gordon, a brilliant if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections?
In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.
In THE AUTHOR by The Author, these same themes take on a grander, even more absurdist scale. Whereas Adam Gordon is a poet struggling with his artistic identity in relative quiet contemplation, The Author is an anonymous A-list celebrity actor who has for his whole life struggled with artistic authenticity: The Author is embarrassed of his life as an actor and always wanted to be an author instead. Now, years later, he’s written a novel so scandalous that his own representation has tried to bury it.
Inside the plot of the novel, the young Author has given up on himself before he’s even given himself a chance, thus surrendering himself to “the industry” (Hollywood) to which he feels no connection other than its promise of fame.
Both books interrogate the nature of self-construction, the tension between ambition and artistic paralysis, and the question of whether authenticity is even possible in a world where identity itself is a form of performance.
But THE AUTHOR takes this interrogation to its most extreme conclusion—whereas Adam is paralyzed by doubt, The Author weaponizes it, constructing a marketing spectacle around his anonymity, turning his very existence into a metafictional event.
By examining Leaving the Atocha Station, we can better understand the intellectual and literary DNA of THE AUTHOR—a novel that takes Lerner’s themes of self-doubt, artistic fraudulence, and autofictional playfulness and amplifies them into a satire of modern celebrity, influence, and literary greatness.
One of the central concerns of Leaving the Atocha Station is the impossibility of knowing whether one’s experiences are “real” in any meaningful sense. Adam Gordon constantly doubts the legitimacy of his own emotions—when he cries at a painting, is it because he is genuinely moved, or because he is performing a version of himself that should be moved? When he navigates relationships with his Spanish friends and lovers, is he authentically engaging with them, or merely constructing a role to be played in a foreign country?
This internal neurosis is mirrored in THE AUTHOR by The Author: while Adam is consumed by the fear that he is not truly a poet, The Author is consumed by the fear that he will never become an author––or that if he does, no one will care, because young people don’t read literature anymore. Hence why he feels he must become a famous actor first. As if that’s somehow a logical conclusion.
The tension between identity and performance is central to both books. The difference is that while Adam’s existential dread immobilizes him, The Author leans into the performance, recognizing that in a world mediated by social media and public relations, there is no distinction between authenticity and artifice—only between effective and ineffective storytelling.
Where Adam Gordon’s crisis manifests in self-imposed artistic inertia, The Author turns his crisis into the ultimate act of creation: himself. His entire literary persona becomes a grand, ongoing PR stunt, mirroring the way celebrities must constantly perform themselves for public consumption.
Both Leaving the Atocha Station and THE AUTHOR by The Author belong to the tradition of autofiction, where the protagonist serves as a barely-veiled version of its biographical author, and the book’s artifice is part of its literary project. Lerner’s novel plays with this in subtle ways: Adam Gordon, like Ben Lerner, is a poet on a fellowship in Spain. He shares his creator’s neurotic inner world, his literary obsessions, his paranoia about artistic fraudulence. The book exists in the uncanny space between autobiography and fiction, refusing to confirm which details are “true” and which are invented.
While Lerner leaves gaps between himself and Adam Gordon, THE AUTHOR deliberately erases those gaps. The novel exists as both fiction and non-fiction simultaneously—both a self-aware literary performance and an exposé that cannot be fully verified. The entire premise hinges on the reader’s participation in the mystery, mirroring the way Adam Gordon constantly questions what is real and what is artifice.
This is where THE AUTHOR evolves past its literary ancestor. While Leaving the Atocha Station revels in ambiguity, THE AUTHOR uses ambiguity as a weapon, turning it into a selling point. The book is not just an autofictional novel—it is a viral marketing campaign, a media spectacle, a high-stakes act of narrative misdirection. The Author understands that, in an age of spectacle, literature itself must become a spectacle to survive.
While Leaving the Atocha Station is primarily concerned with art, THE AUTHOR by The Author expands its scope to interrogate celebrity, media, and publishing. Lerner’s novel mocks the pretensions of the literary world—the obscure poetry prizes, the self-important academic panels, the meaningless fellowship rituals. THE AUTHOR, in contrast, broadens its satire to include the entire machinery of fame.
The Author is both a participant in and a victim of the culture of modern celebrity. He understands the game—he has played it better than most. But in publishing THE AUTHOR, he attempts to escape it, only to find himself further entangled in the system. His agents and publicists don’t just reject the book; they try to erase it. His identity is legally stripped from his own work, and in an ironic twist, the very thing he tried to escape—celebrity—becomes the book’s defining feature. It’s a self-perpetuating ouroboros: a book about a man trying to escape the machinery of fame, which then becomes famous because of that machinery.
This is where THE AUTHOR brilliantly extends Lerner’s themes. Leaving the Atocha Station is an internal novel, existing largely within Adam’s fragmented consciousness. THE AUTHOR, however, turns its protagonist’s internal crisis into an external, public one. While Adam frets over his place in the literary world, The Author finds himself at war with an industry that both created and disavowed him. The stakes are no longer personal—they are systemic. The novel isn’t just about self-doubt, but about how institutions manufacture and destroy cultural figures.
Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station set the stage for a new kind of literary protagonist: hyper-self-aware, paralyzed by self-doubt, constantly questioning the authenticity of his own experiences. THE AUTHOR by The Author takes that archetype and hurls it into the contemporary media circus, where doubt and performance are no longer personal struggles, but tools for survival.
By fusing Lerner’s literary introspection with the mechanics of modern fame, THE AUTHOR doesn’t just follow in the tradition of autofiction—it reinvents it. It’s a novel that doesn’t just reflect reality, but actively manipulates it. In the process, it forces readers to confront a world where art, identity, and publicity are indistinguishable: a world that mirrors the virtual world of social media we now find ourselves trapped inside.
In the end, THE AUTHOR doesn’t just ask whether we can experience things genuinely. It asks whether we can even tell the difference anymore.
