Memoir and speculative fiction are often treated as separate spheres, burying the truth that these two genres can go far deeper when brought together. If the mermaid is more potent, more expansive in its possibilities, than either fish or woman alone, then so, too, is the speculative memoir more punchy than either the autobiography or the work of speculative fiction. Like the monsters they feature, the power of the seven books on this list is derived from their very hybridity. There is also a cultural critique at the center of each of these books, showing another feature of this hybrid genre’s power— speculative writing allows questions of this world to be transformed from the frustration of what is to the wonder of what could be. This is speculative writing at its mightiest because it’s aimed directly at realities that require revision, realities that the memoiristic aspects of these books elucidate.
Holding that quality of playing with truth in mind, my book, Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir, tells the story of someone who is and isn’t me, on a surreal journey through a dystopian Brooklyn full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on the subway. This character lives a life that is and isn’t mine—teaching and writing, raising two rowdy kids, dealing with the daily fallout of being a woman, in a world on fire, in a house that may be haunted—when along comes a goblin. Throughout the book, you’re never sure if the goblin is actually there or not. Is it an eccentric, intrusive, slimy metaphor? Or is there a monster in this story? Either way, the goblin is there to provoke this woman to live more fiercely, whatever that may mean for her. I call this book a speculative memoir because it blends elements of memoir and speculative fiction, but also because it speculates on various ways a book could be, a reader could be, a woman could be, the world could be.
As Goblin Mode speculates on how to reinvent the world, the book, the writer, and the reader by way of experimental forms and monsters, so to do these seven groundbreaking books. Most striking of all, these authors use the monstrous to tear apart the bodies of those old chestnuts—“genre,” “self,” and “literature”—and build something entirely new and audacious. Although not all their authors may think of them this way, I consider these books to be speculative memoirs—books that mix the autobiography with the tools and techniques of speculative fiction. Whether it is literal monsters, or more figurative wonderings about what could be, what could have been, how any given story can be radically reimagined because of the way it is framed, these book tell familiar stories in brand new ways.
Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil
Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial hymn to hybridity is the kind of book that resists definition. The closest I can come is to call it a memoir for weirdos who love poetry, speculative fiction, and theory (I count myself as one of these, so I’m allowed to say it). Laloo, our resident monster-cyborg, much like the book she inhabits, refuses to stay within the bounds of definition. Instead, she hitchhikes across borders both literal and figurative, creating ornate literary patterns of social critique. Laloo is the artist who refuses to be domesticated so that she can create art, but she’s also tied to biological creation, a baby-mother who gives birth to herself, and becomes a monster just after. Laloo is an immigrant to a nation and world whose narratives don’t include her, so she rewrites them.
Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar
In her experimental manifesto, with haunting illustrations from her brother Del, Samatar uses monsters to explore the contours of both imagination and mixed-race experience. She works towards a theory of how monsters have been used when it comes to culture, race, gender, and genre. Samatar recounts calling up her brother one day to ask if he wanted to, “tell our lives through monsters.” Monster Portraits shows what it is to be a hybrid, a monster, a woman, a writer, a Somali-American. This book offers the autobiography of how Samatar monsters herself into art, refusing to abide by all the rules that were never written for her.
One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry
In this gorgeous graphic novel, Barry uses monsters as section headings to examine the haunting memories that made her. These specters resurface in the form of her demons (ranging from “girlness” to the “Aswang” of Filipino folklore), inventively illustrated through text and image without pinning down any single notion of “truth”—a technique Barry refers to as “autobificitionalography.” Barry zooms in on forms of darkness within herself, the spaces where demons-monsters-ghosts thrive, as she wrestles with trauma and the complexities of growing up as a Filipino American. Special care is given to how monsters have origin stories that render their monstrosity legible, almost predictable, unlike her unpredictable, sometimes violent mother.
A Bestiary by Lily Hoang
Hoang fuses myth, monster, and fairytale to create something all her own with this book. She even examines the process of getting there—transforming a more conventional book to speak in a language of magic-tinged fragments. Using the Chinese zodiac as a structuring device, Hoang explores elements from her life—the diasporic Vietnamese American experience, troubled romantic relationships, the loss of her sister, illness of her mother, and addiction of her nephew. She muses on the “other Lily,” the lifesaving doctor her parents wanted. This other Lily pops up in the book from time to time, a speculative take on who she could have been if she’d followed her parents’ dreams. And in another speculative take that earned A Bestiary its place on this list, the animals of the Chinese zodiac are at times rendered monstrous by human misunderstanding, foregrounding the way Hoang doesn’t feel understood herself. These fables, too, seem to come from another Lily—one who speaks only in parables because that is where she finds truth.
The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin
Japanese myth and narrative structure gives this book shape, as do the bestiary illustrations of Lin’s sister, Cori Nakamura Lin. Yet it is, ultimately, a creation all Lin’s own. Lin stresses the power of writing as a speculative form immediately. From that first once upon a time, she makes clear how she will play with narrative, that this will be a writer’s story of monsters, loss, and invention. Lin employs the monstrous as a way of discussing her experience of being both creative and bipolar. She explores mental illness in ways that transcend the typical stories, replacing the more conventional Girl, Interrupted type tale with her own wildly inventive mythologies.
Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman
Electric Literature’s former Editor-in-Chief, Jess Zimmerman, uses the lady monsters of Greek mythology to understand her own woman self while moving through a world not constructed for her. Her memoir uses the stories of female monsters to recount attempts to fit into the stunningly slim confines of “womanhood.” Zimmerman reflects on what her life might look like if this sort of monstrous power were respected, but also on how she can rebel by harnessing it, respected or not. Throughout the book, Zimmerman draws provocative connections between monstrosity, trauma, ambition, power, and creativity. She wants you to know that, through the monstrous, “The stories we’re given can be rewritten, reconceived, even redacted.”
Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
From the first pages of Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal aims to rewrite everything from the tropes of so-called “magical realism” to the hero’s journey—which she reimagines as the Migrant’s Journey. She breaks old boundaries, borders, and forms to make room for the immigrant woman’s experience, reminding us why a hybrid approach is necessary when, as she sees it, such things as trauma and magic are intertwined. She refers to the speculative mode as “the reparative imagination” that can go back and right old wrongs, give voice to the formerly silenced and conceive of new ways of being. Whether it’s The NeverEnding Story, Game of Thrones, or The Witcher, Villarreal tells her story through pop culture and its monsters because they are legible in American culture, and she wants her story to be heard.