‘Fiction as Totally Camouflaged Fact:’ Believability in Stephen Graham Jones's Growing Up Dead in Texas

Stephen Graham Jones's (Blackfeet) genre-bending, autofictional crime novel, Growing Up Dead in Texas (2012), questions readerly expectations of American Indian literature. In setting the action of the story in the West Texas of his own childhood, Jones teases readers with autobiographical possibility. Indeed, nothing is certain about the book: his publisher and reviewers treat the fiction as a memoir in all but name and persist in mapping Jones's public persona onto his protagonist. Reading the novel alongside Jones's craft essay, ‘Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer – and Maybe to Myself’, this essay argues the novel's critical project rests on its formal and generic play as a crime novel. Throughout, the narrator calls his own reliability into question, sustaining narrative pressure on questions of truth and believability in his investigation of the story's central crime, questions that extend to the novel's paratexts and extratextual marketing materials and that take on additional weight given the literary landscape into which Jones writes. Jones invokes – only to upend – generic conventions of detective fiction, turning the magnifying glass through the fourth wall to the reading audience, asserting Indigenous imagination – not just representation – as Indigenous presence and a vital part of the practice of survivance.