Review of Everything Is Fiction: Essays - Article 7

Aug 21, 2026

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A scholarly review examines Vicente Garcia Groyon’s Everything Is Fiction: Essays (2023) and situates it within the wider Everything series. The analysis highlights how the book complicates the fiction/nonfiction boundary, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s critique of totalizing “theories of everything.” It evaluates the three-section structure, the essays’ autobiographical character, and the author’s insistence that narrative impulse turns essays toward proto-fiction while still adhering to conventional form.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages6

Reading Time9 min

AccessFree to download

Review of Everything Is Fiction: Essays

Bibliographic framing and publication context

The “everything” premise and the series’ critical stance

Essays as autobiography and proto-fiction

Organization into three sections

“Choosing the Lonely Art”

“Read the Classics, Boy”

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia | Volume 15 Number 2 | Article 7 | | --- | --- | | 1-12-2025
Review of Everything Is Fiction: Essays
Mark Anthony S. Angeles
University of Santo Tomas, [msangeles@ust.edu.ph](msangeles@ust.edu.ph)
Follow this and additional works at: [https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha](https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha)
Part of the Art and Design Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, East Asian Languages and Societies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Music Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons, Philosophy Commons, Religion Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons | | Recommended Citation Angeles, Mark Anthony S. (2025) "Review of Everything Is Fiction: Essays," Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia: Vol. 15: No. 2, Article 7. Available at: [https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol15/iss2/7](https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol15/iss2/7) This Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Ateneo Journals at Archīum Ateneo. It has been accepted for inclusion in Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia by an authorized editor of Archīum Ateneo. Everything Is Fiction: Essays Vicente Garcia Groyon Bughaw, 2023. 364 pages. The indefinite pronoun everything can be reassuring, as in the expression “Everything is fine,” or ominous, as in the commercial notice “Everything must go.” A book that has “everything” in its title claims a wide range of topics for its scope. Such is the premise—rather, the promise—of Vicente Garcia Groyon’s Everything Is Fiction: Essays (2023). In his critique of totalization and system, Jacques Derrida pointed out that a “theory of everything”—which aims for complete, final, and universal closure—is impossible. The publication of Groyon’s Everything series—Everything Is Realism: Essays on Narrative Craft (2023) and Everything Is First Person: More Essays (2024) are the other titles—should not be treated as an attempt at a closure, where Groyon the essayist could finally rest at the end of a busy week. The series is a three-volume reader, which Everything Is Fiction commences much as the divine week does, with the words “Let there be light.” The three books taken together, according to Groyon, constitute a multifarious autobiography. Everything Is Fiction is, according to its dust jacket,“part memoir, part writer’s journal” and “practically all of [the essays in the book] swerve into autobiography”(2). In the Everything series, the title of the first book is the most intriguing. The author invites readers to guess what he means by it. If it is that “everything (here) is (about) fiction,” then he wants his readers to understand that the book is a compendium of “everything that concerns fiction.” However, Everything Is Realism, described as a “collection of essays on fiction writing and narratives in different forms”(xii), would serve that purpose. They are left with another thought: that the author, himself a fictionist, could be telling us that “all things are fictional,” presumably including nonfiction, i.e., the essay. And so Groyon explains that “the distinction between fiction and nonfiction has always seemed slippery and artificial to [him]” (12). He further claims that: I feel my essays, with their insistent narrative impulse, are not so much essays as they are proto-fictions teetering on the brink of full story-hood. They are meant to be perceived as adhering to facts and shared reality, but are betrayed by the nature of their form. In the end, calling them essays is a concession to the demands of convention. Because I prefer to tell stories, all of these essays were occasioned by some necessity: none of them are “pure” essays with “pure” essayistic impulses. Because I prefer to tell stories, all of these essays are stories, and I would happily label them all fictions, if not for the needs of the market. (3) The essays themselves were written over a span of twenty-five years and were for various

FAQs

What is the central premise behind the book title “Everything Is Fiction: Essays”?

The review explains the title as a claim about the scope of fiction-related concerns, while also suggesting that “everything” may include nonfiction—thereby challenging the fiction/nonfiction distinction.

How does Derrida’s idea of a “theory of everything” relate to the Everything series?

The review connects Derrida’s skepticism toward complete universal closure with the series, arguing the publication should not be read as a final resting point for the essayist.

How is Everything Is Fiction organized, and what does that structure imply?

The book is divided into three sections. Even with an overall sense of collection randomness, each section groups essays by recurring concerns such as writing practice, reading methods, and review-like lecture and paper formats.

Aug 21, 2026

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