Functioning of the historical and biographical narrative is analyzed in the novel How to be both (2014) by the British writer Ali Smith, which helps to reconsider the postmodernist interpretation of the novel prevailing in Russian literary criticism. Ways and the degree of fictionalizing in the biographical narrative of the Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa is accorded with the worldview and aesthetics of Ali Smith, with her transmedial and narratological experiments and, also, in the light of Abi Varburg‘s iconological interpretation of his frescoes. The metamodernist reading of Smith‘s novel, influential in the West European countries, is complemented by reflection on its genre nature (Bildungsroman, biofiction, fiction-cum-biography). The conclusion is made that the figure of Francesco del Cossa is represented more by narrative means than with the help of traditional biographical tools, and also through complex interaction of mimeticity with metareferentiality. The authorial intentions aim at involving the reader into the active reading practices, analogy of which is to be found in the celebration of life and art interosculation, helping the protagonists to overcome loneliness, trauma and mourning. Involving the reader into the narrative through an ―affective encounter with art‖ (Y. Liebermann) allows to perceive the metamodernist structure of feeling in the novel.