The Story Game

by Shze-Hui Tjoa

Overview

As Seen in The New York Times Book Review

“Hypnotic, wise, and thunderously innovative.”— T Kira Madden

 “A powerful work of art and healing.”—Jaquira Díaz

In the humid dark of a eucalyptus-scented room, a woman named Hui lies on a mattress telling stories about herself to her listener, a little girl. She talks about her identity as the child of an immigrant, her feelings about being in a mixed-race marriage, her opinions on mental health. But as her stories progress, it becomes clear a volatile secret lurks beneath their surface. There are events in Hui’s past that have great significance for the person she’s become, but that have gone missing from her memory. What is it, exactly, that is haunting Hui? Who is the little girl she talks to? And who is Hui herself?

As the conversation continues, what unfolds is a breathtaking, unexpected journey through layers of story toward truth and recovered identity; a memoir that reenacts, in tautly novelistic fashion, the process of healing that author Shze-Hui Tjoa moved through to recover memories lost to complex PTSD and, eventually, reconstruct her sense of self. Stunning in its originality and intimacy, The Story Game is a piercing tribute to selfhood and sisterhood, a genre-shattering testament to the power of imagination, and a one-of-a-kind work of art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959030751
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	05/21/2024
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. She is a nonfiction editor at Sundog Lit, and previously served as fiction editor of Exposition Review. Her work has been published in journals including Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and So to Speak, and has been listed as notable in three successive issues of The Best American Essays series (2021-23). Her work has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Disquiet International, and AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program.

Editorial Reviews

"Shze-Hui Tjoa’s memoir is unlike anything else I’ve read. The Story Game shows us the place where forgotten truths can finally be shared. It’s an astonishing work of imagination, emotion, and memory. I’ll be reading this one again."

Wendy S. Walters

"For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know and Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade, The Story Game is a must-read… it offers the reader a chance to heal alongside the author."

Adroit Journal

"The Story Game introduces a major debut work from a most astounding talent. Shze-Hui Tjoa’s memoir not only challenges genre, it upends and splits it wide open. In meditations on grief, displacement, mental health, and family, Tjoa will have you wondering how and why we remember, and what we can’t forget. The Story Game is hypnotic, wise, and thunderously innovative. I will teach this book, I will treasure it, and I will continue to learn from its astute and hopeful insights."

T Kira Madden

"Probes the author's mixed feelings about her father's homeland in Bali, her life in London, the dynamics of her marriage to a white German man and more."

New York Times Book Review

"Wonderfully insightful…. Beautifully written."

Cha Journal

"Shze-Hui Tjoa’s The Story Game is a patient excavation of selves: not the I of today, but the version before and the one before that, flawed and flawing, all the way back to childhood, reaching through history and memory to dust free so many cruel reflections. Ardently exquisite, Shze-Hui Tjoa tenders astonishment with blushing tenacity."

Lily Hoàng

"Imaginative."

A Best Book of May Book Riot

"Both formally innovative and page-turning, Shze-Hui Tjoa transports us in The Story Game back and forth between two sisters in their childhood bedroom and the outside world. We eventually find ourselves siding with Nin's interruptions and questions: Where is Hui? Who is Hui? Tjoa's gaze upon the world is both tender and wry, and for those of us who are women or queer or people of color and have dreamed of a life lived solely in the mind, Tjoa shows us slowly, little by little, layer by layer, how disembodiment often comes at a great cost. With each attempt at truth-telling, we come to see just how easily we can omit what is essential to understanding ourselves and, thus, those most important to us."

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn

"A profound, clear-eyed, and harrowing explanation of what it takes to confront and heal from traumatic memories."

Brooklyn Rail

"Reading this, I forgot about the real room I was in. I felt fully contained in the invented room separating The Story Game’s chapters. In The Room, Shze-Hui Tjoa makes make-believe serious the way children do—but she does it by playing with the memoir genre. As her storytelling progresses, she plunges, as the greatest writers have, to The Depths, revealing how the artistic process transforms her understanding of mind and body. Her ascent into The World is startling and powerful. After I read it, I felt a new world of creative possibilities opening. The Story Game is hyper-specific yet ethereal, serious and funny. It’s mesmerizing."

Jeannie Vanasco

"The Story Game introduces a major debut work from a most astounding talent. Shze-Hui Tjoa’s memoir not only challenges genre, it upends and splits it wide open. In meditations on grief, displacement, mental health, and family, Tjoa will have you wondering how and why we remember, and what we can’t forget. The Story Game is hypnotic, wise, and thunderously innovative. I will teach this book, I will treasure it, and I will continue to learn from its astute and hopeful insights."

T Kira Mahealani Madden