Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night: A Vital Exploration of the Autofiction Genre
A Review by Eva crocker
September 18, 2025
Starry Starry Night. Shani Mootoo. Book*hug Press. $24.95, 372 pp., ISBN: 9781771669566
In Starry Starry Night, Shani Mootoo brings the tireless curiosity of early childhood to a nuanced exploration of the border between fiction and memoir. This unique work of autofiction begins when its narrator, Anju, is approximately five years old. The story unfolds over the course of a few very significant years for both Trinidad and the narrator’s family. Mootoo captures the breathless intensity of early childhood through the immediacy of the first-person, present tense narration. Each scene in Starry Starry Night is full of rich sensory details, and the narrator allows us to sit with these vivid descriptions, rather than interpreting them for the reader. Through Anju’s eyes, we see the intimate details of the division of labor within her home, and supporters of Trinidad’s independence rallying in the street outside. Our narrator may not be old enough to intellectually understand the significance of the political moment she is living through, or of the gendered, racial, and class divisions she observes within her home, but she feels their weight.
Early in the novel, Anju describes the smell of shrimp saying, “...when she empties the bag out into the basin, that mixed-up smell escapes and takes over the kitchen and enters my nose. It’s very loud, but I close my eyes tightly, and when I do that, I see the sky and sea and sand and then I think about the holidays. First there is the long drive from our house, number 39 Selvon Street, San Fernando, all the way to the house in Mayaro. Mr. Monty drives one car, with Polly and Frank in it, and Pa drives the other car, the blue one, with Ma and me.”
This passage gives us a sense of how Mootoo captures the wild unpredictability of a child’s propulsive stream of consciousness. The precise descriptions of who goes in which car, the house’s staff in one and the family in the other, tells us that Anju is attuned to how class defines her experience of the world. One of the strengths of this novel is that it captures the way children make sense of the world before having an explicit understanding of societal rules.
This is especially true in Anju’s experience of being gendered as a girl. Anju wants to play with boys, and covertly introduces herself as Andru when it feels safe to do so. At one point she says, “Everyone thinks I am a girl. But when I grow up, I will be a boy, and Colin and Sheldon will let me be the leader. Tara doesn’t play with us so she doesn’t know girls get captured and die. I have this feeling I am not going to get anything that I want. More and more, it seems to be this way. Everything is confusing, but I’m not sure if I am the one who’s confused or if everyone else is confused.” In this passage we see Anju struggling to come to terms with the discord between her own understanding of herself, and the world’s misinterpretation of her gender.
The sense that the narrator’s perception of reality might not neatly align with that of the people who surround her is amplified by the choice to categorize the work as “autofiction,” a genre which inherently refuses an easy divide between truths and non-truths. Family photographs and childhood drawings are inserted throughout the manuscript, a choice that challenges the impulse to read this poetic text as a work of fiction, even if we hadn’t noted the publisher’s blurb on the back cover.
In most cases, these images correlate directly to what is unfolding in the text. For example, in one scene Anju’s parents have hired a professional photographer to take a family portrait. However, Anju’s father, who has recently gotten into politics as a supporter of Trinidad’s independence, has failed to show up for the shoot. During the session with the photographer, Anju feels acutely aware of being directed to sit at a distance from her mother and younger siblings. The photograph in question appears in the text, the background texturized with hand-drawn lines. In this instance it feels like the photograph has been presented as proof: we see the space between the older daughter and the rest of the family in this image, substantiating the subjective experience recounted in the text. On the other hand, the family smiles out of the image and without the narrator telling us about her father’s unexpected absence and the painful instruction to sit apart from the others, we might interpret this as an uncomplicatedly happy family portrait. The hand-drawn lines in the background suggest the author is filling in what can’t be supported with evidence, or possibly what can’t be remembered. The combination of mediums is a way of acknowledging the impossibility of providing an objectively “true” account of one’s own childhood, by making us feel the author’s presence.
While Anju’s voice is exceptionally convincing, Mootoo purposefully draws attention to the novel as a crafted and collaged version of events. The combination of Mootoo’s presence as a skilled storyteller and Anju’s earnest, energetic voice creates an immersive and moving investigation of how, as children, we are shaped by the overlapping scales of family and national history.
Eva Crocker is the author of the short story collection Barrelling Forward, and the novels, All I Ask, and Back in the Land of Living. She is a PhD candidate in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, where she is researching visual art from Newfoundland. Her new short story collection, Bargain Bargain Bargain, will be published by McCelland & Stewart in 2026.