It’s not that I never read realistic fiction and not that I don’t like it. It’s just that sometimes I don’t get it. I know realistic fiction, speculative fiction, and genre fiction are just terms we made up to sell more narrative, but I’m skeptical of how the expectations and norms of realism lurk, largely uninterrogated or even fully articulated, in the way readers, editors, and publishers interact with work that purports to depict quote unquote real life. 

Most broadly defined, realistic stories depict the quotidian and accurately reproduce the daily events, characters, and settings of the world we live in. In practice, this definition is less solid than it initially appears. The word "accurately" is asked to do a lot of work here, creating the expectation of objectivity and a shared understanding of what can be observed, or what is considered normal and daily. Despite this implied consensus, when evaluating realistic fiction, we still use words like "believability" to judge whether or not we, the reader, think that the author has created work that actually reflects reality.

I think it might be useful here to make a distinction between stories that have verisimilitude, which are "like real," and stories that "feel real," which is something else. This is a conversation genre writers have a lot. When you’re writing non-realism, making sure that what you’ve made up "feels real" is paramount. It’s what makes the statistical unlikeliness of a romance novel plot work, what makes a far-future cyberpunk city work, or what makes a mystery’s culmination feel satisfying—not that it is realistic or depicts something that could actually happen, but that it feels plausible by some mysterious calculus. It makes narrative, emotional, and/or logical sense. Of course, satisfaction and sense are culturally and personally informed, which is to say, subjective. There’s no way around the fact that it’s a "call it like I see it" situation.

A comment I get all the time on my writing is that people don’t know when the events in my fiction are supposed to happen, in what order, or how long ago relationally to the present of the story. And for a while I said, No problem champ, no issue! I can fix that so easily, I will decide when all of these things happened just for you, so you aren’t confused and you feel grounded in the narrative. So that the story feels real and believable to you. 

It’s been made repeatedly clear to me that normal people, realism’s most treasured subjects, experience daily life in a linear way, with events logically oriented in time. But recently, I’ve been thinking that I haven’t known what day it is for my entire life. So it wouldn’t be an accurate reproduction of real life if I included that information, because I’m the one writing it.

Lately in my own quote unquote daily life I have been feeling that there is always fucking something. Are you guys feeling like there’s always fucking something? Every day I’m like, what fresh hell awaits me? And it’s always some fresh fucking hell. And my life is like, not that bad. Do you know the Nick Flynn memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City? I think about the title like, once a week. Like there is always some fucking bullshit, that is so true.

After something really violent and fucked up happened to me, I was talking to my friend Robyn about how I can’t really watch horror movies, because they are way too scary for me. The horrible thing that happened was also frankly a little bit too scary for me. She understood this, but she’s also had a lot of horrible things happen to her and really enjoys horror movies. She said their structure makes sense to her, and she brought up Carol J. Clover’s concept of the final girl. In horror movies, the final girl is subjected to nearly unimaginable violence and her happy ending is that she lives, traumatized, but alive. If you have a few too many scary things happen to you for a little bit too long, can your real life still be realistic fiction or does it become horror? If you’ve experienced nearly unimaginable violence, how can any happy ending without it feel relatable or realistic or quote unquote earned?

Experiencing a violent crime was quite the surprise. Some critics are saying that it “Didn’t really make sense with the rest of the plot,” “Should have been signposted earlier in the story,” and “Didn’t resolve in a satisfying way” and wow, I agree. It’s kind of weird to be spending your life in a quirky dark comedy and suddenly be in a slasher movie. If something abnormal has happened to me, is my real life still realism? If it is normal to me, then am I allowed to write about it? Is this quotidian now or do I have to go do the dishes? Or is that too quotidian, not interesting enough, not plot relevant, not believable character work? Can I still be narratively compelling if I’m crazy in the boring way where nothing happens? Has my bad attitude made me an unlikable narrator? How many bad things can happen to me before it’s overwrought trauma porn? At what point do I become unrealistic?

I don’t need my own experience edited out of my own work so other people can find it sufficiently believable and sensical. It’s profoundly alienating to be told, obliquely and directly, that your experience definitionally is not objective and so is definitionally not realism. Objectivity isn’t even that real. We made that up to sell the Age of Enlightenment.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, she says that when she was in the middle of her abusive relationship, she lost the ability to think in anything but fragments. You can see this type of fragmented storytelling in my favorite short story of hers, “Especially Heinous.” When I talk to people about Her Body and Other Parties, this is reliably people’s least favorite story, because it quote unquote doesn’t make any sense.

In "Especially Heinous," Machado creates fake summaries for eight seasons of Law and Order SVU, each episode getting a few-sentence-long blurb of its contents. Read together, these summaries create an alarming, non-specific miasma of fear and harm. As the reader progresses through summaries of bizarre and disconnected violence, trauma compounds and warps the characters. The repetition becomes ominous and accrues narrative weight, forming a palimpsest of potential meaning that never truly coalesces into anything. It makes perfect sense to me. Sometimes that’s what life is like.

A few winters ago during my state-mandated seasonally depressed fugue state, I got really into The X-Files. In it, almost every episode has a new monster of varying strength and the new monster is terrible but survivable, and Mulder and Scully either process what happened or they don’t, and whether they do or not there’s always another fucking issue, and it’s their job to deal with it. Sometimes, all of the little monsters end up circling back to one big monster and you learn that it was actually a government conspiracy all along, or maybe aliens, or maybe actually a government conspiracy. It’s crucial that you don’t actually get to know and any conclusion you draw may in fact be retconned later. This is all deeply relatable to me. It’s possible I’ve had kind of a difficult past couple of years.

After my toxic trash hole of a mutually abusive relationship ended, I wrote a story in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure. The story was a series of vignettes depicting an abusive relationship, which is very bad but never bad enough for an inciting incident, or a climax, or for either character to experience growth, or make a decision, or change. In the story, the form provides you with a million opportunities to leave the relationship and if you don’t leave, the story has you start over until you do finally choose to leave and thus reach an ending. You could go on forever in that story or you could end it at any time, both things true at once. This was, to me, the truest way to tell this story. To tell it straight would not have communicated the truth of how it was. It would not have been realistic.

The story has no payoff. It’s possible that it was very boring, didn’t make any sense, and no one understood it, but so was being in a shitty relationship. I kept getting the edit that people wanted it to build to something. And it did. If you are tortured in the same way every day, forever, that is an escalation, no? I had something to say about that experience, specifically about the fact that it never went anywhere and couldn’t be made to mean anything and then one day it was just kind of over and I was relieved. I was led to believe there was a genre in which people were encouraged to depict the reality of their lives.

When I was a teenager, I was really obsessed with the CW show Teen Wolf. In it, no one ever processes anything. In Teen Wolf, a bajillion people die and every week there is some new fresh werewolf bullshit and if you had to deal with the psychic weight of those plot lines on the characters it would really bog the show down, so Teen Wolf doesn’t deal with them. Years of Monster of the Week begin to strain the very apparatus of the show, as the characters have to bear the unbearable weight of years of there always being fucking something. And then they go to prom about it. Everyone is like, Wow, I miss Allison, our dead friend, but unfortunately that was last season and there are a lot more monsters to catch. And you know what, I miss my dead friend too but it was last season and there really are more monsters to catch.

I once received edits on a story I wrote about some intrusive thoughts I was having in which the people I loved died violently. The characters also invent the philosopher’s stone, so technically it’s genre, not realism, I guess. I wrote it, for some reason, in vignettes that were temporally completely out of order. I am sympathetic to the fact that this was likely very hard to follow. I’m not trying to be difficult. I put the story in chronological order, on my editor’s request, because it was not clear to some theoretical reader why I had done it the other way. Does anyone know who this theoretical reader is? Like, do we know them? Do they go to another school?

I had written the story out of order only because I had no sense of where any of my problems had begun, no sense of how they might end, and no concept of escalation. It didn’t matter what order the story was in to me because I couldn’t conceive, at the time, of anything proceeding in a linear fashion, of anything leading to anything else, or anything having a beginning or an ending. Anyway, I have since been cured of this affliction. I am on medication and believe in the Freytag pyramid now.

In Garth Greenwell’s review of Victor Heringer’s The Love of Singular Men, he says, so precisely in defense of the pieces of the book that feel like “shiny, fascinating details that don’t add up to much,” that we’ve been lulled into thinking that perfectionism is an aesthetic ideal. But then, elsewhere in the essay, he says that he doesn’t understand why, “the chapters count up to 66 (that long chapter in which Camilo imagines both Cosme’s and Renato’s deaths), then count back down to 34.” But why wouldn’t they? How could they not do this? Because sometimes you reach an end and then continue, still, backwards. It seems so clear to me.

This essay is actually about Denji. My favorite thing about Denji, the titular Chainsaw Man of Chainsaw Man, is that he has the most dogshit life imaginable. Denji starts out with nothing and somehow by the end, he has even less. You’ve heard of, the dog dies at the end? Well Denji’s dog dies in the first episode and then immediately after that he has to go bash through a big, dripping zombie army. Even when you win a little in Chainsaw Man, you don’t win forever. There are always more devils to kill and even when you kill the devils, eventually they come back and you have to kill them again. That’s just the way it is and you get maybe like 3-5 seconds to think it’s a bummer before there’s another problem.

The quotidian in Chainsaw Man makes sense to me like the final girl’s ending makes sense to me. Between bloodbaths, Denji eats dinner with his roommates and they fight over the bathroom. Between Denji dying and his dog dying and fighting a big bat monster and the monster’s worm-monster wife and getting puked on in front of his crush, Denji goes home and eats a lot of kinds of jam on toast. He’s like, Well, this has all been kind of a clown show, but at least there’s jam on toast. So true, you know?

The moments of mundanity in Chainsaw Man aren’t really a panacea for any of its horrors, except when they are, and they’re not the actual plot, except that they are, and they aren’t the happy ending, because they only happen around various horrifying events in the middle of the long arc. Just a little season finale before everything really goes to shit, for good this time. This is the kind of ending that feels the most real to me, one moment of ‘this specifically doesn’t suck’ before getting cut into chunks again.

Monster of the Week shows aren’t limited by the constraints of realism, its implicit consensus on what is normal or possible in content or in structure. Monster of the Week is described on TV Tropes as "the complete antithesis of the Story Arc." Its format, an endless parade of randomly selected challenges with no actual reprieve, meaningful catharsis, or hope for a permanent culmination, creates its own kind of verisimilitude. Have you ever thought about how most Monster of the Week shows end? They kind of don’t, is the thing. I never actually finished The X-Files. I don’t know how it ends, except that it ostensibly did and then got picked up again like ten years later. I couldn’t tell you how Teen Wolf ends if you paid me and I think I did finish it. In my head it’s just season after season, no true culmination, a forever middle of endless arcs, just like the texture of real life.

I do like realistic fiction. I’ve read James Baldwin’s Another Country. I know realism can work. Some realistic fiction I even read and think, this is kind of what my life is like or, this has something to say about the way life can be lived. This brings meaning to my existence, this says something about the way people live that I find enriching or challenging or illuminating or (sorry) relatable. Recently, I read Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas and thought: I didn’t know it was possible to be this clear and honest about not only what happened, but exactly how it felt. That was a real, true relief to me. I guess I just find it a little frustrating that we have the "this is like real life" genre, I’m like, damn, is it? Like actually, is it? These are the only real lifes we have? Are there not more in the back?

I’m not truly arguing that Monster of the Week shows are more realistic than realism, only that their expansiveness is what allows them to get so close, sometimes closer than straight realism seems to, to an accurate reproduction of daily life. And yet, that’s exactly what I’m arguing. Is this framework any less flawed than the framework used for realism now? Are we more accurate when we define realism too narrowly, or too broadly? Is it possible to define it perfectly? I know when I say that my life is some monster of the week bullshit, what I mean is that that’s how it feels, sometimes, to me. But is how it feels different from how it is? If I’m honest about how it appears to me, do I lose my claim to objectivity?

I want there to be more space in realism for the unceasing maximalist hell in which I live. I want to be allowed in realism without having to lie. It feels cruel to me that you have to be able to make sense of something before you’re allowed to try and tell a true story about it. It feels cruel that you either have to know how it ends or be willing to make up something convincing. So often, things never end and they never make sense to me. Who is given the privilege of being sure?

I understand how narrative is supposed to work. I know that plot must be imposed upon living for it to be a story. Unlike Monster of the Week shows, a book about real life should be about one thing and it must start and end somewhere. The more I try to find a way around this, the less sense I make. And no one likes that, least of all me.

I understand that a story is a container in which things have time to be processed and articulated, a place where meaning can be made. I understand that by the end, readers want a sense that something has been resolved. I understand that that is satisfying for them. I guess I just question the actual realism of that.