Hello evolutionists, revolutionists, imagineers, and creative explorers!
Write-minded is celebrating memoir as an evolving form this week, tackling the difference between imaginative writing in memoir and writing in memoir that might not be true. Memoir is increasingly embodying its rightful spot in the realm of creative nonfiction, in that there’s allowance for writers to explore ideas and truths within the realms of creative devices, imagined conversations, different points of view, and more—and yet how do we keep that within the container of Truth? Listen in to this episode to find out more, and to hear from a rising talent, guest Shze-Hui Tjoa.
Other form-breaking memoirs we love:
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Heavy by Kiese Laymon
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith
Breathe by Imani Perry
What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas
Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
What are some form-breaking memoirs you’ve read and loved?
Partial transcript from the show
Brooke: Welcome to your weekly installment of Write-minded. I’m Brooke Warner, here with my ever dependable cohost Grant Faulkner. I’m excited about today, Grant, because our guest is emblematic for me about something I’ve been talking about, writing about, for some months now—and that’s this idea that we’re in the midst of a memoir revolution, a memoir evolution. I’m very recently coming off the heels of having taught an 8-week course called The Evolution of Memoir, the whole premise of which had to do with experimentalism in memoir. It was about form-breaking and bending and how nonlinear structure seems to be more the norm these days than ever before. So I guess it wasn’t a surprise that I was drawn to this work by today’s guest, Shze-Hui Tjoa. I absolutely love this memoir, Grant. It’s called The Story Game, and I think Shze-Hui Tjoa is an emerging voice, someone we’ll look back on and say—we had her on our show in the early days, in the emerging days.
Grant: I love when I get that feeling about one of our guests—and then I love when it comes true because several Write-minded guests have gone on to win big awards. This week we had the privilege of hanging out a bit in person in San Francisco, and I asked you about this book and why you loved it so much, so I’ll pose that to you again now, for our listeners to hear. It feels like it hits a bit of a zeitgeist moment, and memoir readers, and lovers, and writers, and publishers ought to be paying attention because I think you’re right, we’re in a heyday of memoir, right this very moment, and we want to make sure that our listeners are, you know, paying attention and celebrating with us, too.
Brooke: For sure. I think that’s right. Memoir is having a moment right now, and it’s not just about getting its due. It’s really about the explosion of creativity that we’re seeing, the way that memoirists are owning memoir as a realm of creative exploration. For years and years memoir had pretty rigid rules about it. A lot of that had to do with Capital T “Truth” and how far memoirists were allowed to venture into the world of the imagined. And what we’re seeing right now is a relaxation of the rules—an allowance for memoir to encompass writing and form that is not so restrictive. And The Story Game is embracing this allowance. What I loved about it is that it’s hyperstructured, which is one of my things. I love a well-executed structure. The book alternates between this imaginative construct of the author in a room with who we believe to be her sister, having conversations about stories. The sister is saying to the author, Hui, tell me a story. And then they unpack the stories, and the sister gradually beckons Hui into telling more and more foundational and meaningful stories, until she delivers the final and most impactful. What I loved about the book is that I’ve never read anything like it before, and I’ve never seen a memoir writer so boldly press the boundaries of her imagination, and to also see and notice and witness that these imagined conversations with her sister are absolutely the realm of memoir writing. I am really excited about breaking all of this apart. I’ve been teaching memoir, as you know, with Linda Joy Myers for more than a decade, and we used to joke that you had to be careful because the memoir police was out there and lurking. And it feels like the memoir police are on hiatus, in a way that’s giving permission for memoirists to explore and express and be creative in a way that has traditionally been reserved for novelists. And yeah—that’s exciting for me. I guess I love being surprised by the evolution of a genre that I’ve been so immersed in for so long. And to see that it’s being driven in this very grassroots way by writers taking chances and executing beautiful writing that demands our attention.
Grant: I know there were some really high profile cases in the 2000s that might have brought on this policing of memoir—with books like A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. These are notorious cases of authors having fabricated elements of their memoirs, calling their stories true when they were not, and then being outed, and publicly shamed. Mortenson actually committed suicide in 2012, and many speculate that it was over the fact that he was outed for not having told the truth in this book. So those are some pretty heavy consequences. I just want to separate this out, Brooke, because when we’re talking about imagination in memoir, what we’re talking about is something wholly different. I wondered if you could elaborate just for anyone who might be thinking that we’re endorsing memoir being untrue, and even what it means for memoir to be a “feat of imagination,” which is how Hui’s editor describes this book.
Brooke: Yeah, this is important because memoir has always been firmly housed in the world of creative nonfiction. This line between truth and non-truth has always been central to the genre. Memoir is true, so the events that take place in a given memoir must have happened. Now . . . let’s pause here because what we’re now seeing in memoir is more permission for things that “could have happened,” or which “might have happened.” For a long time in my memoir classes I’ve been distinguishing between emotional truth and fabrication. The so-called memoir police have gotten worked up, and justifiably so, over things that are completely fabricated—so in the case of A Million Little Pieces, he wrote about things that never happened, like going through a root canal with no anesthetic, that was a big one. There were other parts of his story, too, that no one could corroborate. In the case of Three Cups of Tea, the writers were basically outed by 60 Minutes, saying that what they presented in the book was blatantly false, including the inspiration for his work in Afghanistan, which was was the opening anecdote in his memoir, where he got lost while mountain climbing in rural Pakistan and stumbled into the village of Korphe. They nursed him back to health and inspired the author to build a school. Problem is, that didn’t happen. So we understand the line between “didn’t happen” and “happen,” right? When we talk about imagination it’s something very different. Basically it’s in its structure, whose organizing principle is these imagined conversations between Hui and her younger sister. These conversations are technically imagined by the author, but they’re portals for her to tell stories about her past, and also to introduce the reader to this sister, who is real, but who’s estranged, and we see the way that these imagined conversations allow Hui to reconnect with her sister in real life. So it’s incredibly imaginative, but the boundary between truth and untruth is not the same as someone making something up that didn’t happen. Instead this book shows us how the mind is an expansive and imaginative place, and very much the realm of memoir.
Grant: That’s intriguing, and an interesting way of reframing how we think about truth. I know that a lot of people and writers, notably Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir, have tried to draw this line in the sand—to say that making things up out of whole cloth is very different from reconstructing things from your past, whether that be dialogue, or what someone might have been wearing. She makes the point—it happened or it didn’t. But what you’re saying is that Hui is exploring the inner recesses of her mind, the terrain that’s there that’s true but also that didn’t happen as they’re imagined conversations. I think of Werner Herzog’s notion of what he calls “the ecstatic truth”—the expression of a truth that goes beyond fact, but the story serves truth, not lies as the memoirs I mentioned earlier did. That seems to be the kind of thing that’s increasingly becoming okay for memoir. Is that right?
Brooke: Yes, in essence, and it is a seachange. I think we’re seeing more poets writing in the memoir space. We’re seeing more people want to push the boundaries of memoir and self-expression. I want to be clear, there are writers who have been doing experimental things for years like Maggie Nelson and Abigail Thomas. But this is different, and I think that we’re just seeing a lot more of it. For instance, in Hui’s book, when we get toward the end, she the culmination of the book, the book’s central story, is told from the point of view of Body. In this way it’s almost a third-person execution. This final story in the stories that make up The Story Game, is about Hui’s experience of her parents forcing her to undertake rigorous piano practice from the time she’s 8 years old. So a passage reads:
Over the next year, and the next year, and the next, what happens in the piano studio is too terrible for words. And anyway, it is not the focus of Body’s story, since Body can no longer recall it as a set of discrete, describable actions. But the main thing is that Body, which was once so happy, soon lives in a state of irrepressible fear. . . .
This is a 20-page chapter, and it’s riveting. Shze-Hui sees herself in this chapter as Body, completely disconnected, emotionally. Her young body is breaking down due to the number of hours she spends in the studio. Referring to the scoliosis she develops, she writes:
Some doctors comment on the unusually fast pace of this decline, given the specifics of Body’s stature and age. Its pace could have been hastened by lifestyle factors, they suggest—for instance, hunched posture or prolonged immobility. Sitting down for hours each day before a piano say.
“Is she generally inactive?” ask the doctors, meaning Body.
“No, she’s busy,” say the parents, meaning Mind.
Grant: Wow, that is powerful. Really fascinating to see the way that disconnecting the writerly “I voice” from an experience adds a certain almost eeriness. I know memoirists have long experimented with the second person, that “you” voice. And she could have done that here to great effect. But by personifying “Body” and “Mind” as their own entities, she shows you the compartmentalization of her self, but done to her, in this case by her parents who insisted she was basically a piano machine.
Brooke: Yes, and there’s much more to the story, too. It’s about being an Asian woman married to a white man, it’s about estrangement from her sister. In between the conversations she has with her sister, she is essentially writing essays about her life. It’s a fascinating book, and one that’s so additive to this genre. I’m excited for the future of memoir, like I said, because there’s just this burst of energy and creative form that just feels unparalleled. So again, not that no one before has ever been creative and pushed the boundaries. We’re just seeing more, and the execution is phenomenal. I can’t recommend this book enough for that reason.
Grant: That is exciting, Brooke—and I think this says a lot about where the genre of memoir is going. Sounds like it’s coming into its own, and that’s long overdue. I’m eager to talk to Shze-Hui about her book, her process, and her approach—and we’ll get to do that after this very short break.
This Week’s Book Trend:
This week’s #booktrend is an unfortunate one, and it's the decline of kids’ reading of the “middle-grade-books.” Sales of these books, covering ages 8 through 12, were down 10 percent in the first three quarters of 2023, after falling 16 percent in 2022. According to an article in Slate, it’s the only sector of the industry that’s underperforming compared to pre-pandemic 2019. It’s no secret that kids’ reading unfortunately often hits the wall around third or fourth grade, but it’s hitting a bigger wall now—and it seems kids are reading for fun less and less. Some in the reading field call it the “Decline by 9.” According to research by the children’s publishers Scholastic, at age 8, 57 percent of kids say they read books for fun most days, but at age 9, only 35 percent do. Adults of course can good reading role models to the young readers in our lives by reading together and prioritizing the entire reading and writing ecosystem for the kids in our lives.
ABOUT SHZE-HUI TJOA
Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. She is a nonfiction editor at Sundog Lit, and previously served as fiction editor of Exposition Review. Her work has been published in journals including Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and So to Speak. Her work has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, and AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program. Her debut memoir is The Story Game.