Sometimes, the phrase “formally inventive” ends up being used as a polite synonym for “highbrow, but boring” (or “man, I couldn’t really follow the narrative of this book at all”). But there’s no reason why this should be, right? Genre-bending books can be fun. Many are both inventive and propulsive page-turners—using form to convey truths about the human psyche that can’t be expressed in the usual ways.
As its title suggests, my memoir, The Story Game, is a book that plays with the construct of storytelling. It asks: where do our stories about ourselves come from? And what do these stories hide or obscure; what do they protect us from knowing fully about ourselves, and by extension, about the world?
To ask these questions, The Story Game busts open genre conventions, and ends up bridging memoir and imagination. But to be honest, I didn’t set out to write a book that messed with form. I wanted to write something that would hook readers’ attention, and show them truthfully what the world inside my head felt like. Here are seven other genre-bending books that do all of this and more:
A surreal, sublime novel about an Inuk girl growing up in 1970s Nunuvut, Canada. I love the hard brilliance of Tagaq’s prose. Also, how she captures nature’s brutality and beauty—the way the land imposes its will upon human beings, as their mistress who gifts them rituals for survival. The text reads like a kind of shapeshifting incantation, too—dancing across poetry, prose, and illustration to express its meanings as vividly as possible.
Dreams of Maryam Tair: Blue Boots and Orange Blossoms by Mhani Alaoui
This gorgeous novel blends Morocco’s recent political history with magic and myth. It follows the adventures of Maryam Tair, a special child born to a mother imprisoned during the 1981 Bread Riots. As Maryam grows up, fantastical beings like a witch, a giant, and Scheherazade the storyteller help her to become a beacon of resistance for her people. I just adore this book. A fairy tale about the spirits that watch over us when we seek to transform the world.
My Work by Olga Ravn (translated by Jennifer Russell)
Ravn’s memoir—about pregnancy and motherhood—almost feels like it was written by a body, in a body’s voice and with a body’s nonlinear sense of time. I think it comes as close to physical sensation as the medium of words can allow: chopping up diary entries and poetry, jumping around in space and time, and playing with points-of-view to capture how motherhood reorganized Ravn’s sense of self. An appropriately “monstrous book for a […] monstrous experience: giving birth.”
Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China by Hualing Nieh
This novel is told in the voices of two characters, Mulberry and Peach—who are really one woman living with a split personality, after having survived the political upheavals of 1940-60s China. Mulberry is the woman’s “old” self, who lived through World War II and civil war before becoming a fugitive in Taiwan. And Peach is the woman’s “new” self, who has immigrated to the US. Nieh brilliantly captures how a person must dissociate to survive being uprooted—as well as the bizarreness of the rupture between the old and new worlds.
At first this novel reads like a madcap, hilarious caper, as we follow our protagonist on his book tour as “America’s hottest new author”. But unease builds as we realize that something is off: why can’t our author remember anything about the book he wrote? Who is the mysterious, “impossibly dark-skinned” kid who keeps following him around? And why does everyone keep asking him if he’s heard the terrible news about “that boy on TV?” This book—about being Black in America, and the worlds we invent to cope with systemic injustice—is one of the most inventive I’ve ever read.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
A fictional biography, detective story, and alternative history of the US rolled into one. A widow is trying to write the biography of her late wife, an iconoclastic celebrity artist named X. She goes digging into X’s past in the Southern Territory—a theocracy that split from the rest of the US after World War II—while following the trail of her collaborations with various art-world superstars. But eventually, she ends up learning far more than she bargained for, while also reaching some chilling conclusions about X’s influence in her own life. A rule-bending book about the effects of power and control.
And finally, one of my favorites. This novel is told in the voice of the various spirit beings who inhabit a girl named Ada, as she grows up in Nigeria and then emigrates abroad. It’s a gloriously—often heartwrenchingly—polyphonic coming-of-age story, where the text metamorphosizes freely to keep up with the protagonist’s inner life. A profound meditation on how we might be individuals, but at the same time, we are many. We are containers for the multitudinous world.
