Epistolary ... It is a bit of a head-scratcher. While plenty of people write autofiction, few are interested in energetically reopening serious wounds in both their public and private lives ... Myerson’s attempt to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction makes her book less successful as either one.

Affecting and winkingly titled ... The ethical dilemma of writing about the self is both the core tension of Nonfiction and what beckons it into existence ... Poignant, if subdued ... A feeling of triumph glimmers between the lines ... Yet the confines of Nonfiction grow perplexingly and frustratingly narrow as the book progresses. The narrator may be flayed open, but the other characters are held at arm’s length, vague and bloodless ... I wanted Myerson to step back from the mirror at times, to more fully engage with her other characters. But Myerson seems most interested in parsing the act of writing about one’s personal experiences ... These are the novel’s animating questions. Given all that she has endured, Myerson had the opportunity to offer fascinating answers. Instead, she supplies noncontroversial defenses of artistic expression.

Though Myerson has built up a sizeable backlist of edgy, psychologically dark tales, this 11th novel cuts deeper than any of its predecessors. Its title may sound overly meta, but here is a book that instantly sucks the reader down into a swirling vortex of grief, trauma and powerlessness ... It’s a self-lacerating exercise that’s impossible to look away from. Sometimes cautious, occasionally accusatory, frequently rinsed of any feeling except stunned horror, the text is addressed throughout to 'you,' meaning her daughter, though the reader can’t help but feel somehow implicated ... 'Raw,' a word that will probably be used a lot of Nonfiction, captures its headlong intensity but simultaneously undersells the authorial alchemy at play here. Because this novel blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love, compassion and creativity. And in its bare-knuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted – it’s almost shockingly exposing. More so, perhaps, than true nonfiction ... With this new novel, the author goes further than most and the results are nothing less than incandescent.

...while Nonfiction reads on one level as a writer defending the right to write what she likes in whichever way she pleases, its knowing proximity to real life is also unavoidable ... Yet Nonfiction also feels locked in a baleful quest for significance. It’s delivered in an uncompromising second person singular, which can be a powerful animating narrative tool but which here sometimes feels disingenuously performative. The prose is featureless and insistent, like strip lighting, yet the effect varies from the unrepentantly bland...to the dissembling trick beloved of autofiction in which an awful lot is supposedly implied by sentences that literally convey very little ... The writer Rachel Cusk...feels like an unofficial referential framework throughout, both stylistically – Myerson’s prose resembles a watered down version of Cusk’s elegantly distilled clarity – and in terms of substance: there are distinctly Cuskian moments when the narrator, like the narrator in Cusk’s acclaimed Outline trilogy, attends literary festivals and fixates on incidental encounters with strangers ... Such moments also allow Myerson to shoehorn in stagy conversations about novels and autobiography and how it’s assumed that female novelists will draw on their personal lives in ways that men do not, and are then attacked for doing so. But these are well worn, increasingly tired arguments. What I couldn’t get over was how little I actually cared about the novel’s blood and guts; the unfolding tragedy at its centre. Why, you wonder, did she even write it? One only hopes that now she has, this whole sorry saga has fully run its course.

This is a novel of addiction and a family coming apart at the seams. Relentlessly bleak and unswervingly self-lacerating, it’s a maternal horror story that cuts to the emotional bone.

So much is painful, and feels truthful ... art made by people who know what they are talking about is invaluable. No one could have written more honestly about the torment of watching a child descend into addiction than Julie Myerson. Only she and her family will know if she has paid too high a price for it.

...fiercely intelligent ... While the dreariness of the subject matter might be exhausting for some, it is never overwrought on the page. Myerson’s narrative is focused and powerful.

To title the novel Nonfiction feels less like a middle finger to critics and more like self-flagellation. The narrator is a bottomless well of self-pity, the book pressing an old bruise by imaginatively unspooling what was surely a real-life nightmare into a full-blown artistic obsession. On the one hand, this can make for emotionally claustrophobic reading; on the other, it feels, ultimately, like the truth. Both confounding and compelling.