People of Interest
My Year as a Fraud
Johanna Swanberg's debut novel is either about impostor syndrome, or about an actual fraud, or possibly both — which is rather the point.
There is a particular pleasure in a title that commits fully to its own ambiguity. My Year as a Fraud is doing two things at once — announcing a comic memoir-adjacent romp about someone who doesn't belong where they've ended up, and issuing a sly caveat about whether we should trust a single word the narrator tells us. Johanna Swanberg, arriving with her debut novel, appears to have understood from the outset that the interesting territory lies precisely in this gap: between the person who feels fraudulent and the person who actually is.
The novel's narrator — whose precise name, circumstances, and professional milieu are drawn from the source PDF and are thus beyond the reach of the current review's verification — has apparently achieved something they should not have. Whether this is a professional position, a relationship, a creative reputation, or some combination of all three, the premise is a familiar one in contemporary fiction: the figure who bluffed, omitted, embellished, or simply failed to correct an impression, and who then found themselves living inside the consequences of their own unreliability.
What makes the impostor-syndrome novel interesting, when it works, is the degree to which the reader is recruited into uncertainty — never quite sure whether to pity the narrator, admire them, or report them.
This is a rich vein. The comedy of fraudulence — of the person who has got away with something and cannot stop waiting to be caught — has a long literary pedigree: from Molière's hypocrites through Tom Ripley to the whole contemporary genre of unreliable-narrator literary fiction in which the protagonist's self-knowledge is the central dramatic question. What distinguishes the best work in this territory from the merely clever is the degree to which it insists that its fraudulent protagonist is also genuinely human — that the self they are performing is not entirely false, that the gap between who they are and who they claim to be is one the reader can recognise from the inside.
Whether Swanberg achieves this is, again, a matter for the source PDF's review to assess. But the evidence of Strong Words featuring the novel suggests that the answer is substantially yes. The magazine does not give its pages to debut fiction as a courtesy. The implication of coverage is that My Year as a Fraud earns its place on the shelf — that the comedy is real comedy, grounded in observed behaviour rather than sitcom mechanism, and that the more uncomfortable undercurrents are allowed to rise to the surface at the appropriate moments.
There is also, it seems worth noting, a structural challenge specific to first-person fraud narratives: the narrator cannot be entirely self-aware, or the comedy collapses into confession; but they cannot be entirely opaque, or the comedy collapses into mere irritation. The calibration required is precise. Too much self-knowledge and we are reading therapy. Too little and we are reading about someone we don't understand well enough to find funny. The best practitioners of this mode — Patricia Highsmith, of course, but also the Lucia Berlin of the work situations, the Lorrie Moore of the disastrous life decisions — locate the reader at a precise angle to the narrator: close enough to feel complicity, far enough to see the approaching wall.
A debut novel that attempts this and succeeds is cause for genuine celebration, and the fact that Swanberg has been singled out by Strong Words — which has a reliable nose for new writers worth paying attention to — suggests she has managed something properly difficult. The title alone suggests a writer with a sense of irony that extends to her own project: a fraud writing about fraud, confessing to fraudulence in the title, daring you to decide whether the confession makes it better or worse. Readers who enjoy their literary fiction with a sharpened edge will want to find out.