Literary Hoaxes and the Ethics of Authorship | The New Yorker

When people had an issue with the author, it was because they felt that he or she had violated what is known in narratology as the "autobiographical pact." This is the tacit understanding that the person whose name is on the cover is identical to the narrator, the "I," of the text. The pact obviously governs our expectations about memoirs, but it extends in a more general way to books in which the speaker or the protagonist is presented as a fictionalized version of the author (so-called "autofiction"), and it extends even to straight-up fiction: if the name on the cover seriously misleads us about the identity of the author, we can feel we have been taken in.