Here listening to all the backlist, a weekly show about books that are not new. I'm your host,

Danica Ellis. This is episode number 467.5, and today I'm going to talk about a couple of memoirs that aren't actually memoirs.

So I like many people, really like books that experiment with format and blend genres and I

think an interesting thing about books and reading is that we have to split things into genre just to try to find the right readers for it and

because if you walked into a bookstore and it was just one continuous alphabetical order system of every single book in existence.

That would be really overwhelming.

So it makes sense that we have genres, but also these categories are definitely going to be limited.

There's only so much you can convey about a book from the genre.

And a lot of books just don't neatly fit

into one category.

And those books are often the most interesting,

because they're playing with so many different things.

Like I obviously have to think of in the dream house by Carmen Maria Machado,

which is an incredible memoir that is told in all of these different formats, lenses, all of these different ways

of looking at the same story by interpreting it through fairy tale or Pulp Fiction or something else.

And that is a memoir and it belongs in the memoir genre, but it's also so many other things and it differs so much from your standard

memoir that it kind of feels meaningless to put it in the same category.

So I love exploring the edges and the limitations of genre and really any category. So today I want to talk about a couple of books

that aren't in the memoir genre they wouldn't be categorized that way in a bookstore, but they also do a lot of the same things that memoirs do.

But before I get into that, I want to talk about one of our newest newsletters.

It is Better Living Through Books,

which is a way to learn new things, sharpen your skills,

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