AustLit

My Life as a Fake, despite the fact that it presents a departure in terms of setting and theme, still feels familiar, not least because, as Robert Macfarlane explains, there is a good deal of "epistemological blurriness" in the novel regarding notions of authorship and originality. In this respect, Macfarlane argues, "My Life as a Fake represents the climax of a conceit with which Carey has long been fascinated: that lies, hoaxes, and fakes are, at their most successful, deeply creative forms of expression." My Life as a Feake, the critic points out, thus not only sums up some of Carey's writerly preoccupations. Its literary-philosphical thesis - that "under careful scrutiny the apparent opposition between 'making' and 'faking' collapses into nea-identity, that fakery of some sort is a normative and necessary condition of literary creation, and that repetition is the first making and plagiarism the unoriginal sin" - is also at the heart of a "mini-tradition of recent anglophone fiction".' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxiii)