I’m going in on this one this week because this is a topic I feel strongly about.

Week 4: (Nov. 19 to 23) – Reads Like Fiction (Rennie @ What’s Nonfiction): Nonfiction books often get praised for how they stack up to fiction. Does it matter to you whether nonfiction reads like a novel? If it does, what gives it that fiction-like feeling? Does it depend on the topic, the writing, the use of certain literary elements and techniques? What are your favorite nonfiction recommendations that read like fiction? And if your nonfiction picks could never be mistaken for novels, what do you love about the differences?

____________________

I really dislike the phrase “reads like fiction” when it comes to describing nonfiction, and it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why. But I’m going to try to dissect this bit by bit.

“Reads like fiction,” is a shorthand way to describe a nonfiction title with a narrative arc that uses “literary techniques” to tell a story. In other words, it’s not a textbook or a guidebook. Instead, it has something akin to a plot, even though nonfiction doesn’t have a plot. Often, it has a thesis or a central theme it’s working to get across.

But we don’t do this sort of description for fiction. I can’t ever recall hearing a fiction title being described as “reads like nonfiction.” Certainly, descriptions about how well-researched or fact-filled a novel is comes up in a review or in a blurb for a book. But it’s not described and, more importantly, held up as good because it “reads like nonfiction.” Yet, that’s how “reads like fiction” comes across when applied to a nonfiction title. The book is championed because it’s got a rhythm and a flow to it that doesn’t feel like a textbook might.

Why, though, do we limit nonfiction to just a couple of categories? There’s nonfiction that “reads like fiction,” and then there’s nonfiction that doesn’t read like fiction. Yet, nonfiction is a very nuanced category of books, filled with a wide array of types of books. Certainly, there are textbooks, there are workbooks, there are guidebooks, and there are “fiction-like” books. But when you break it down further, “fiction-like” books eliminate a whole host of books that don’t fall neatly into the categories of workbooks, textbooks, guidebooks, and other similarly-formatted books.

Do essay collections read like fiction? If so, do they read more like short story collections than a novel? Given that short story collections can often be a hard sell to the average reader, is the same sort of mentality there when it comes to essay collections? Are they more likely to reach a specific audience, rather than a broader reading audience because they don’t “read like fiction?” Or, if they do “read like fiction,” they read more like short stories and therefore, a very specific type of fiction reading experience?

What about memoirs? Memoirs are, of course, a slice of time and experience within an individual’s life, as told through their own words. They might “read like fiction,” but does saying that also diminish and remove the empathy that we as readers should feel because they’re not fiction? Does it also muddy up the idea that someone’s lived experience could be so beyond what we perceive as “normal” that we’re skeptical and therefore able to discredit the story as an exaggeration or pockmarked with untruths? Tara Westover’s Educated is one that comes to mind immediately here: I’ve read many reviews that question the authenticity and the honesty, and I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason — aside from the infamous James Frey A Million Little Pieces debacle — is that the book reads so much like fiction that it’s easy to forget that there was likely immense pain going into the writing of one’s real, lived experience (and, of course, some sexism because that’s a given).

Perhaps the biggie for me is this: who determines what fiction and nonfiction read like? Fiction is such a rich array of stories and story telling styles. This is evident when you think about the fact fiction forms include comics, include verse, include epistolaries, and include other alternate formats. Nonfiction works similarly, but it’s not given the same sort of treatment for its varied formats that also includes comics, verse, epistolaries, and other alternate formats.

These determinations come from a dominate idea of what storytelling, literary techniques, and writing look like, and those determinations are often made by those in power. Cishet, straight, white people, with a strong leaning toward men as opposed to women in this category. The same people who determined the idea of what a Western Canon looked like. Who decided storytelling in English takes on certain structures and sticks to particular conventions and grammatical rules that were, again, created by one segment of people. It’s a limited scope of the potential for literature, and applying those same standards to nonfiction further limits the scope of people outside this demographic to share their truths in ways that are authentic to them and their experiences.

“Reads like fiction” flattens nonfiction and flattens the power of writing. It diminishes researched work and diminishes lived truths. But we return to it as a phrase to describe titles again and again because we haven’t found a language that allows us to better describe what makes a nonfiction title compelling and because we’ve limited ourselves to one frame of reference for talking about books. We haven’t spent the time teasing out the biases that exist in our own understanding of writing and presenting nonfiction. Rooting through oppression requires work.

I sat on a panel at the American Library Association’s conference this year called “Reads like Fiction: Nonfiction You Can’t Put Down.” Authors on the panel included Nicole Chung (All That You Can Ever Know, a memoir), Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita, a book about the kidnapping of Sally Horner and the building of the book Lolita), Anne Boyd Rioux (Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Matters, about the staying power of Alcott’s Little Women), and Eugenia Cheng (The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, a book about the power of logic and math in making sense of the world at large). Our books have nothing to do with one another and none of the themes carry over. There are personal stories here — my book and Nicole’s book — and there are two books that dig deep into the history and cultural aspects of two classic works of fiction — Sarah’s book and Anne’s book). Eugenia’s book is a book of applied research, presented in a way that anyone can access and better understand the ways we can navigate a challenging world through logic.

This sort of set-up wouldn’t happen in the world of fiction. It’s likely that the memoir-style books would end up on a genre-angled panel digging into that. The two books that present context and research to classic fiction would go into a genre-angled panel digging into that. And the book on logic would maybe fall into a genre-angled panel about applied math, science, and/or philosophy.

In other words, a panel on realistic fiction. A panel on historical fiction. A panel on science fiction.

There wasn’t a lot of room for nuance on the panel. While I loved hearing about all of the panelists books — and I’ve been making my way through them as they’ve published this fall — there was little room for digging into writing nonfiction or about the process behind each of the books. The process for each is so different, and the choices made in how to structure the books so different. But that becomes flattened under the simple description of “reads like fiction.”

I don’t think any of the books I’ve read from this panel, nor my own anthology, read like fiction. They read like the nonfiction styles they were developed to be. My fascination continues in thinking about the choices underpinning how those books were structured, how the formats helped carry the bigger points across.

“Reads like fiction” feels lazy. Certainly, it’s an easy way to sell a book to a skeptical reader. But to sell a book to a reader, the fiction readability comparison isn’t what most are after. They want a book that draws them in, that compels them in some way, and, even when presented a nonfiction title on a topic they were itching to find a novel about, it’s about the way one sells the topic itself. “Reads like fiction” doesn’t mean anything because fiction itself reads in so many ways. The same should be said about nonfiction.