In Shze-Hui Tjoa’s memoir The Story Game, we accompany the narrator as she reconstructs herself. We don’t know why she does so, we just know she needs to. We watch her take wrong turns, turn around, and try again. Like an actor without many credits who has to play a person who is bad at acting, she risks getting it “wrong” before showing us she can get it “right.”[1]
Or if Tjoa cannot—because no words can ever, truly—get it “right,” she can at least get it righter. But this very palpable show of effort, attempting, trying: maybe this is why The Story Game constantly feels on the verge of cringe. Too cute, too cerebral, twee, out of touch, childish. Yet it marches up to that line again and again, without crossing it.[2] Fair point. But yes, it’s a playful taunt, a dance: “You thought I was that naive?” she seems to ask, with a hint of a smile.
Because naive it is not. In fact, I would argue that the form and content of The Story Game are about undoing naivete. The project is one of exploration, about the ways we lie to ourselves when it’s too painful not to, how we let a simpler worldview drop over our eyes when we need to see things in black and white. And how that worldview cannot always bear the weight of the messiness that is always there, whether we look directly at it or not.
The Story Game is not as interested in the lies themselves, like say, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror. It’s more about the persistence of those lies, the messy back-and-forth of attempting to unravel them.[3]
In the story where I am the main character, The Story Game came into my life at the perfect time. I famously (“famously”) both write memoir and find the standard memoir redemption arc boring in its necessity. The boredom comes is this: you cannot be an unreliable narrator in a work of nonfiction. You’re supposed to be bearing witness, that’s the whole point. But my love of literature has often depended upon the ever-present possibility of narrative unreliability.[4]
Enter The Story Game, to help me on this journey. Let it be said that I am not suggesting some Orientalist thesis about women of color serving as a source of inspiration, intrigue, or edification for white women (though it did, for me, a mostly white woman, do all three). I’m trying something here.
Shze-Hui Tjoa sees my boredom, and she says, “I’ll take a whack at it.”[5]
In grad school, the teacher whose approval I sought the most said she thought there was some performative potential in creative writing. But, she said, in her experience there were too few people who did it well enough for the field to be worth exploring or developing. I daresay The Story Game would garner this professor’s approval in its performative potential.
First, a definition: by “performative” I do not mean “performance-like,” or “theatrical.” I instead mean it in the sense of J. L. Austin’s “performative speech act,” where words can be used not just to describe but to enact. The epitomal examples are wedding vows, ship christenings, and knighting ceremonies. Pronouncements that make things so, in a way things were not before the words were said.
Here I acknowledge the fact that I have been playing fast and loose with the concept of “review.” I have not directly quoted the book, nor even said much about its contents. This is by design. You can go google some other review, I trust a book this good will get plenty of coverage. This is an homage, my favorite type of writing, the Critic as Artist a la Claudia La Rocco.[6]
As I read, each time I started to feel like a story was a little too neat, too pat, seemed tied up with a bow, the conversation in The Room would agree with me. “Okay but now tell the real version,” the little girl always begged. She prompted the narrator to tell a realer story, which led to revelations in the narrator, which we as readers get to discover along with her. And even if these moments are ultimately a reenactment of the healing the author has already done, it still leads to a place that we can see the author going toward. Like a ramp, it propels her into the real world, where (I believe, I hope) she confronts the reality of her life history in ways we are left to imagine.
This sort of revisitation of seemingly lost memories is a process Shze-Hui takes us through as she revisits past traumas. I suspect, by the way, that so many memoirs feature mentally ill protagonists because the volatility of their (our) lives takes away a bit of the tedium of the Classic Memoir Plot. Tjoa could have easily used her own mental struggles as such a routine sort of guide, and yet she did not.
One criticism, which I already overuse but will still make here: its greatest strength might also be its weakness. The book’s performative style means we can never forget that we are always stuck on the inside. And not just inside the narrator’s world but further—we are only ever inside her mind, limited by her singular perspective. For this reason, it can feel like the chugging momentum toward the book’s conclusion—exciting though it is—suddenly drops off, as we are led not to an ending but a beginning. And it is both tantalizing and a little disappointing that we do not—indeed cannot—accompany the narrator we’ve grown so fond of.
This, surely, is also an overused sentiment, so allow me to further elucidate. In the stories we are told, our narrator is relaying tales to a young girl. The sections with the girl are all titled simply: “Room.” The mystery of it leads to one predictable outcome: an explanation of what that room is, and who is in it? At first, I imagined it was one part of the author’s psyche talking to a different one. I had just finished The Artist’s Way, and one of Julia Cameron’s suggestions for Morning Pages is to address your artist self, which is also your child self. I have begun adopting this practice in my notebook: when I’m stuck, or can tell I’m bullshitting myself, I address her: What do you think, Little Audrey?[7]
I won’t spoil the mystery, but suffice it to say that, once it had been revealed, I would have spent many more pages with the narrator in her new reality. Perhaps the book needs to end where it does, because of the inability to get “outside.” Still, I would follow this author anywhere. I look forward to reading more of her work.
If I believed in such things, I’d cry “destiny.” Instead, I choose “bellwether.” If The Story Game is any indication of where creative nonfiction is heading, it’s an exciting time for the genre, indeed.
[1] (You’re thinking about Keyla Monterroso Mejia, who plays Maria Sofia Estrada on Curb Your Enthusiasm, huh?) Yes, yes I am. (You should reference something more literary, like Gillian Flynn’s move at the beginning of Gone Girl.) Yes, but spoilers!! Also, that’s my point—Flynn had already published Sharp Objects and Dark Places, both of which were less formally risky. (Oh, I get you.)
[2] (For my taste, anyway.)
[3] (I hope you’re not just primed to compare these two titles because both writers are Asian women.) Me too. Really me too. But I have loved both these books, and I’d like to think I was mainly reminded of Tolentino because of her book’s subtitle: “Reflections on Self-Delusion.” (Well. I’d like to think I’m not a figment of your imagination, but here we are.)
[4] That’s where the art sneaks in! (According to you. I just hate how most memoirs are so predictable. Beginning, middle, end. Bad stuff happens, then it’s hard to fix it, but we do. Neat. Pat. Blah.) I hear you, Little Audrey. (You say that a lot. But what does just hearing do for me?) Good point. And it’s true that I reach out to talk to you when I need something from you, so when all I offer is “I hear you,” it probably rings a little false. (Yeah. It sucks.) Well, I had us read this book, didn’t I? (Yeah, but you made us. For homework. For advancement. For your ~literary visibility~ or whatever). You got me there. I’m sorry, Little A. (It’s okay, Big A. I’m glad you keep trying.)
[5] (That quote is in The Parent Trap.) I know, that’s why I picked it. (Because I’d recognize it?) Yes. (Both Hallie Parker and Annie James say it, but they’re both played by Lindsay Lohan.) Yep. The movie had just come out on VHS when we had our tenth birthday party. (The plan was to watch it from sleeping bags on the Embassy Suites room floor, eating pizza and junk food.) Yes, but as it happened, Nsync was staying in that same hotel, and we waited patiently outside of their limo in order to meet them, which we did, later that night. (Yeah that was crazy!)
[6] (With whom you also took a class in grad school.) Yeah, yeah. (If I didn’t name-drop you would have.) Fair enough.
[7] (Well for one, I want you to explain that “child” self is not childish but childlike.) Yes, definitely not childish.
Audrey Moyce 