I RECENTLY HAD the joy of working in a bookshop for the first time in almost ten years, while also reading a lot more narrative non-fiction than usual. Walking around the aisles with piles of stock for shelving, I found myself interested in where non-fiction books end up on the shelves, and why.  

Helen Garner’s The Season sat in Biography, alongside glossy hardbacks about historical figures (but not sports stars or musicians, which mainly ended up in the Sports or Music sections). Those looking for a book on footy – or at Garner’s fiction – wouldn’t have stumbled across it. Tiffany Watt Smith’s Bad Friend grapples with relationships, which landed it in Self-Development despite it being closer to History-meets-Memoir (Memoir-Plus, as some call it). And Bullet Paper Rock, Abbas El-Zein’s incredible National Biography Award–winning memoir, could be easily at home in Current Events – a category that, at least in this bookshop, was just stickered as History. 

Meanwhile, most of the fiction swirled around together, with only Crime, Fantasy and the contentiously labelled Classics in their own sections. Of course, there was a growing Romance section – a big part of why fiction sales remain steady while non-fiction stalls, mushroom books notwithstanding. Outside these sections, fiction readers scanned a gamut of titles – hoping that their next read would speak to them from the masses – while non-fiction readers beelined straight for their ‘section’. Both groups of readers would probably enjoy narrative non-fiction – true stories told in creative styles that evoke the same enthralling experience of a novel. However, neither fiction nor non-fiction readers would easily stumble upon those titles either. 

Publishers can put almost any genre they want on the back of a book, but there are certain parameters that inform how they classify them to the rest of the industry. Thema global categories have largely replaced the US-based BISAC and UK-based BIC systems; Thema offers over three thousand categories and sub-categories that help digital and brick-and-mortar booksellers know which books go where. The massive umbrella of ‘Fiction’ is one of twenty or so main categories; the rest are mostly sub-categories of non-fiction. A narrative non-fiction book could either be placed in its most relevant specific sub-category, or under the general ‘D: Biography, Literature and Literary Studies’ sub-category ‘DNX: True Stories’. Even among all these options, it is still difficult to accurately categorise books that play with genre and form.  

Perhaps this all feels less relevant in an era where search terms and algorithms transcend the categories stamped above barcodes. Amazon, for example, is notorious for placing books wherever it wants; there are plenty of bookshop owners who curate their own sections, putting interesting books of all kinds on display together. Word-of-mouth is still the method of book discovery to rule them all. I try to remember that many people refer to books of all kinds as ‘novels’ and have the same which-is-which blindness about fiction and non-fiction as I do about left and right. But as it gets harder for publishers to break out more experimental titles of all kinds, the barrier to discovery feels like another reason to justify their risk aversion. 

There’s an enlightening note at the end of Bullet Paper Rock about the more encompassing and ‘fertile’ tradition of Arab autobiographical writing that El-Zein’s work emerged from. This is the kind of expansive definition of narrative non-fiction that I would love to see embraced.  

I’VE FOCUSED ON non-fiction for most of my career as an editor and publisher. When Margot Lloyd and I set up our independent publishing house, Pink Shorts Press, we planned to specialise in this genre. That is, before we signed up three novels and a book of short stories for our first year’s releases.  

Working with non-fiction lets me devour novels in my personal life without it feeling like work, and it makes editorial suggestions feel ever so slightly more objective. It can also seem like less of a gamble than fiction, or at least better for publicity opportunities. This is typically the case for easy-to-categorise topical non-fiction, famous-face non-fiction or even illustrated non-fiction like cookbooks. But narrative non-fiction doesn’t quite have that solid grounding.  

There are plenty of arguments against publishing narrative non-fiction. The wisdom goes that it is harder to sell rights to international narrative non-fiction publishers, who care more about acquiring local voices than those acquiring fiction. Garner’s recent international-pop-star success with her non-fiction suggests otherwise. Others say non-fiction doesn’t stand the test of time. Admittedly, the latest tell-all memoir or ‘big idea bullet points’ tome does loserelevance pretty quickly, but Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations – now approaching its two-thousandth birthday – is an enduring rebuttal. In fact, a number of non-fiction titles sit alongside the novels in Classics.  

During the first year of Pink Shorts Press, we published a book that walked between the realms of fiction and non-fiction: Olivia De Zilva’s Plastic Budgie. In spite of its semi-autobiographical content, we decided to categorise this inventive debut as Autofiction rather than Memoir. Elaborating on this decision, Olivia stated that ‘non-fiction would’ve tied the book into a certain space, with certain conventions and expectations. The book is too experimental to conform to a particular genre, and I’m glad that I could straddle the boundaries a bit.’ 

Autofiction isn’t a Thema category (and so, we just put ‘Fiction’ on the back of the book). However, the growing use of this term has been a helpful way to categorise the books that proudly straddle the boundaries between novel and memoir. Ultimately, we feel it has opened up a number of opportunities for that book in terms of readership and engagement, as well as giving De Zilva more creative and personal freedoms in both writing and talking about the work. 

Lots of big prizes, such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award or the Booker Prize, are only open to literary fiction, which automatically renders exceptional but experimental works ineligible. It would be remiss of me here to not give a shout out to the Stella Prize, which judges all genres alongside one another (as long as the book was written by a woman or a non-binary person). I love that this encourages people to look beyond categories when considering a book’s merit.  

On that theme, there is a gendered element to categorisation. On the back of the novel I’m currently reading, published in the US (where they are even more specific about genre), the classification is ‘Fiction/Women’. Many men will say they only read non-fiction, which explains why so much of it flies off the shelves before Christmas and Father’s Day (and why Tony Abbott’s gilt-titled Australia felt frustratingly well published). Anne Trubek – author of the ‘Notes from a Small Press’ newsletter – writes that she publishes fewer women because she prioritises subject-forward non-fiction and, according to her, women write less of that. Unpacking this statement would require another essay altogether. 

Goodwood Books – a beautiful second-hand shop here on Kaurna Yerta – specialises in books by women from the twentieth century. Proprietor Sarah Tooth recently spoke to me about reshuffling her non-fiction shelves. So much of women’s non-fiction, she says, is classified as memoir. It’s personal writing, not necessarily subject-forward. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a subject. Sarah has scattered the books across their relevant categories instead. After all, who says a memoir of everyday life during a war is less useful than a serious historical account of which men did what in that war?  

Helen Garner and her contemporaries, such as fellow diary writer Barbara Hanrahan (two of whose books we excitedly brought back into print last year), wrung their hands about the domestic focus of their books – both fiction and non-fiction alike. Garner and Hanrahan also contended, and still contend, with accusations of their fiction being grounded in reality and their non-fiction in imagination. Non-fiction is defined through what it is purportedly not, but we know all non-fiction has a bit of fiction in it. That blurring of reality and imagination is part of the magic of reading. 
 

PINK SHORTS PRESS is very excited to have two narrative non-fiction books in our next release: Tracy Crisp’s Pearls, a creative exploration of dropped stitches and grief, and Margaret Merilees’ Scared Angry Laughing, a hilarious meditation on activism and aging. Both have a strong sense of narrative and voice, as well as a sprinkling of imagination. For Thema categorisation, we used ‘DNC: Memoirs’, but that doesn’t really cover it. We will categorise them as‘non-fiction’ on the back cover, send them out into the world, and hope. 

_{^{Image credit: Lesley Juarez via Unsplash}}