The present contribution aims at analyzing Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiographical work Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale) using psychoanalytic theory and Paul Ricœur’s notion of subjectivity (Soi-même comme un autre / Oneself as Another). By means of the analysis, Vivir para contarla is revealed as containing a high degree of fictional construction, something that gets especially clear through García Márquez’s self-representation. Eventually this self-irony throws both an autobiographical and an autofictional light on García Márquez’s fictional writings. In this way, Vivir para contarla endows, rather than a biographical key to it, the understanding that this author’s magic realism is a blend of lived experience and fabulation.