This article addresses the problem of memory in recent narrative fiction dealing with trauma in Argentina and Chile, questioning the relations and dialogues that this genre establishes with those of referential type, considering the foundational role that autobiographies and testimonies play in the narrative and aesthetic exercise of memory. Our hypothesis postulates that fictions dealing with memory have as a common factor what we will designate 'anamnetic illusion', that is to say those discursive processes of evidenciation of memoralistic work produced in fictional literary work. In this way the anamnetic illusion develops at the intersection of fiction, referenciality and traumatic memory, a space of unstable autonomy.