This article investigates Benazir Bhutto’s Daughter of the East: An Autobiography in the paradigm of fictional autobiography. Louis A. Renza’s theory “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography” reveals the intergenre nature of autobiography, an indeterminate combination of truth (fact) and fiction based on self-invention. The research aims to examine the elusiveness of autobiography, as a literary genre, its fictive composition and the author’s political motives for pursuing the narrative design of fiction writing. Autobiography embraces the devices of skilled narration (elaboration and narrative freedom) and eludes accuracy, impartiality and inclusiveness. Bhutto creatively narrates her past events, family history and religious and political ideologies without considering the limitations of nonfiction. The study finds that Bhutto manipulates the concepts of death, honour, and democracy into the idea of martyrdom for the faith. Life writing is paradoxically structured on a fictionalization of nonfiction instead of a factual representation of the writer’s memories. This praxis of experimentation with the literary form renders the autobiography a fictional outlook, the conflation of fiction and nonfiction. Daughter of the East: An Autobiography is a distinctive mode of self-referential expression which converts its author’s lived life into an elaborately constructed project of fictional past, an autofiction. The autobiography is a fragmentary, arbitrary and incomplete record of the autobiographer’s life.

Index Terms

Autobiography, nonfiction, honor, fiction, martyrdom, death,