If you look at the bestseller lists today and study the book prize shortlists, you will notice that in many successful and celebrated works of fiction and scientific non-fiction, the authors speak more or less openly about themselves. Writers such as Emmanuel Carrère, Rachel Cusk, Daniela Dröscher, Annie Ernaux, Wolf Haas, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgård, Deborah Levy, Édouard Louis and Maggie Nelson do it in autobiographically colored novels about passages from their own lives. And in the humanities and social sciences, Sara Ahmed, Didier Eribon, Steffen Mau, Ewald Frie, Paul Preciado, Lea Ypi and Eva von Redecker take their personal life experiences as a starting point to make general observations about the past and present of society.