The aim of this essay is to find signs of autofiction in the autobiographical novel Ru written by Kim Thúy. We also examine the functions of autofiction in the novel. What purpose can an autofictional strategy of writing serve?Autofiction is a literary term with many significations and that is why we have formulated our own definition of autofiction in this essay. The practice of autofiction is not new, it is in fact a historical category and we think that this shows the value of autofiction as a very human way of writing, and that this value is related to the human memory and to the wish to relate past events in a more vivid way. For exemple, a comparison can be made between the human memory and autofiction; both of them have pictures of own memories and also pictures of memories that someone else gave them. It is also possible that fiction and reality blend unconsciously when we call to mind events from the past.Ru is the first novel of Kim Thúy and it describes her and her family’s life during the Vietnam War, under the communist regime’s terror, as refugees and as immigrants in Canada. The author hop from present time to past time according to her memory. Ru does not have chapters, instead it is composed of many short stories which are linked togheter by a thought or a word. It is not an enumeration of events, places or numbers, in Ru it is the individual’s perspective that is in focus.We have analysed the autofiction in Ru according to the following points: écriture consonantique, littérarité, rétrospection dialectique, découpage temporal and reconstitution. In our analysis we have shown that there is autofiction in Ru. First of all because the novel is not written in a chronological order but also because it contains the authors search for her-self which is also a search for healing of traumatic experiences. We have also dicussed the functions of autofiction in Ru and we have seen that Kim Thúy insert stories of others which has a function for the collective history of the people of Vietnam. Kim Thúy uses fiction to make the readers imagine the real. In this way, fiction and reality are not opposed, it is just two different manners of talking about the real world.

This study aims to analyze the representation of motherhood in two works by two contemporary female authors: Une femme, a major work by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, and the novel Mãn, by Canadian-Vietnamese author Kim Thúy. The two novels share a common theme of motherhood and describe the close relationship between mother and daughter. Although the stories are based on the experiences of the two mothers, they are narrated by the daughters. The authors' approach to the theme is also similar in that they are strongly social realist, even more explicitly in the case of Ernaux. Our aim has been to understand motherhood and the relationship between mother and daughter from a feminist perspective that shows how traditional notions of gender are conveyed in these works and how the author reflects them in the text. To do that, our interpretation is based on a feminist literary theory that also uses phenomenology as a method to understand the reader-response perspective.