What is Genre, Anyway?

In this conversation, author Isaac Fellman and literary agent Kate McKean discuss how writers and the publishing industry define genre . . . and realize the more you talk about it, the less clear the concept becomes.

Isaac Fellman and Kate McKean are both writers; Kate is also Isaac’s agent. They are both interested in genre bending but are uncertain about what, exactly, is being bent. What is genre made of? Where does it fall on the Mohs’ scale of mineral hardness? Could Batman bend genre? How about Superman? If you bend it too much, does it break? They sat down for a chat to answer some of these questions, although not the one about Batman.

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Kate McKean: Hey, Isaac, what genre is your book?

Isaac Fellman: In the same way that I know gender is a construct and I also know that I’m a man, I know genre is a construct and I also know my book is literary fiction. You could call it a lot of things! It’s about a vampire (urban fantasy) who is an archivist (which I’d argue a lot of people see as a fantasy/mystery-coded job); it is mostly a love story (romance) in which the stakes are all about character (literary), but the plot is about ghosts (gothic). It’s a trans story by a trans author, and it’s about my real job, so it may feel like a memoir or roman à clef, although it’s really not. My publisher calls it literary/romance. The New York Times, in the person of Casey McQuiston, calls it “equal parts romance and mystery.”

All genre definitions are pretty reductive, of course. Imagine breaking down my gender in the same way, and you get essentialist nonsense (“My favorite scented candles are the woodsy ones . . . but I have experience as the subject of misogyny!”). That’s why I think genre is a weird, special type of thing. It’s a marketing tool that’s also a deeply felt instinct for most writers. My first book was a secondary-world fantasy, and I was always aware of trying to make that work. I felt like I was writing fantasy primarily to escape something—the ethical knots of writing about real-world politics and faith. I think that people who are sincerely drawn to fantasy don’t write it to escape those knots; they write it because they want to tie some of their own. I think my first book succeeded in being an intricate and unique knot. I still love it a lot, but writing literary fiction about people who more or less live in our world (and whose fantasy problems are largely metaphorical) turned out to be much easier and more natural for me. Ultimately, it just feels better to call myself a literary writer. Once again, the trans subtext is unavoidable!

KM: This is a very good answer! But it is also many answers at the same time, which doesn’t always help—depending on who’s doing the asking about genre. (This is not a fault. This is just the nature of this question.) When I ask about genre as a literary agent, which is my job, I am really asking, “What shelf in the bookstore does your book go on?” There is no “trans subtext with a hint of gothic” shelf, but I would read them all if there were. Your book will go on the fiction shelf in most bookstores, though it can vary from store to store, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some put it on the fantasy shelf.

When readers ask about genre, I think they’re asking,“Is this going to be the kind of book I like?” Which is why I think authors can say whatever genre they want depending on the context. In the case of some genres (i.e. Regency romance, space opera), you have to have a certain set of characteristics to call your book that. But otherwise, few books are any one thing, even though that complicates my job.

How do you approach genre as a reader?

IF: I think most of us read books that will validate our worldview, which isn’t as cynical as it sounds. Nobody wants to be told that their worldview is invalid—we get that enough in the world outside of books. Validation is also not always comforting. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire validates my sense that it’s very difficult to overcome our self-obsession long enough to fall in love. Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? validates my sense that getting older is frightening and disorienting.

Some forms of genre fiction set themselves the challenge of conveying a truth about humanity while also writing people who are really, really stylized. Sherlock Holmes has to be impossibly cavalier about death; Ann Leckie’s ancillaries experience consciousness in ways no living person does. How do you convey a legible worldview when you’ve made such a radical adjustment on the soundboard? I think that’s what interests me about reading genre fiction: how an author answers that challenge.

All genre definitions are pretty reductive, of course.

What about you? How do you approach it as a reader, and do Kate the agent and Kate the writer have different answers? Are they different readers?

KM: Unfortunately, Kate the reader has approached genre in terms of what she should read, instead of what she wants to read. That is, until a few years ago, after my kid was born, and I gave myself permission to read whatever I wanted and not what everyone I followed on Twitter was reading. I read something like forty graphic novels that year. And more adult fiction than I’d read in many years. I have recently read a lot of a very specific type of historical novels—ones set in America, usually in the 1930s to ’50s, and usually centering a woman trying to have a career. One of my favorite books of all time is Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, and I am always trying to replicate that.

My instinct here is to say, “I don’t read these things to validate my worldview,” which of course is false. I am a white cis woman whose career is practically the center of my life, and the freedom of that choice has not always been available to women, and far less so for women of color or trans women. But even still, it is a hard choice. I want to watch how it has been hard for other women, to commiserate, or compare notes, or share in their triumph (because these books most often have a happy ending). If that’s not worldview validation, I don’t know what is.

IF: Right! It doesn’t mean your worldview is narrow or needs shoring up; it can mean getting a sanity check on your view of life. Other people see what I’m seeing, right? What’s interesting, what’s pleasurable, what’s dangerous?

KM: Kate the agent approaches genre more precisely, or maybe more clinically. As an agent I don’t have to know how to write all genres, but I do need to know how people buy the genres in which I focus in my work. You do not want Kate the agent to represent your political thriller about rogue CIA agents. I don’t read them. I don’t know them. I don’t know the editors who buy them. I haven’t picked up that as a genre in my professional life because it is not a genre I enjoy in my personal life—so it’s not like those are two completely separate worlds. Kate the agent approaches genre as a tool. How does categorizing this story help me get this amazing book published? How might it help connect it to the readers who will love it the most?

In turn, this has also spilled over into how I approach genre as Kate the writer. I don’t specifically set out to write A Genre when I start a project or book—I just have an idea. I assign the genre later, or my agent does—LOL—and go from there. Because I am not writing highly specific genres like Regency romance, I don’t have to worry if my book is doing the right things to fit in its genre.

The more I think about this, the less sure I am about the genre of anything! Why do you think writers and readers have a lot of feelings about genre when publishing treats it like a marketing tool and not an assessment of value (. . . mostly)?

IF: I think publishing sees genre as a marketing tool, but writers and readers see it as a statement of faith. Our genre allegiances reflect our basic beliefs about people and ideas. Dorothy Sayers and Raymond Chandler have very different views of the world, but they’re reflecting on similar questions: Is justice possible for the dead? How does wealth—old, sudden, or ill-gotten—affect the psyche? How do people go back to everyday life after the traumas of a world war? And as I mentioned above, how do you explore the psychology of someone in the inherently unrealistic situation of being constantly surrounded by inventive murderers?

Of course, not every example of every complicated subgenre of mystery is about money and trauma and justice (and stylized characters under artificial constraints), but that plays into my point too. To me, Sayers’s and Chandler’s work defines what mysteries are about. I think of other kinds of mysteries as worse examples of the genre, even though, objectively, this is a hundred kinds of wrong. I want to read mysteries in order to engage with these ideas, to the point where I define “mysteries” as books that engage with them.

We all know what type of reader we are, and publishers are pretty good at catering to the general types of reader. This is a very normal progression of ideas, and yet it results in a total split between readers, who define genre as “something that speaks to the fundamentals of who I am,” and publishing folks, who define genre as “a way of selling books.” Then there are the writers, who are often both readers and publishing folks, and who therefore are very confused.

You’re right that the more we think about genre, the less clear the whole concept becomes. I thought that I’d end up there, but I didn’t know it would happen this quickly. I also really feel you about the difference between the genres we feel obligated to read and the ones that really sing for us. I’d ask you whether a hierarchy of genre prestige does anyone any good, but I already know the answer. So instead I’ll ask you: What do you think a utopian view of genre would be?

KM: I have never contemplated a utopian view of genre, but I am absolutely giddy with the prospect. And I would have approached it solely from a publishing point of view if we were not having this conversation. From a publishing point of view, this would mean a solution to the nagging problem of book discoverability, one all of publishing has hoped <waves hand vaguely in the direction of> technology would solve. Many have tried. None have succeeded. If it were easier to find the books you really wanted to read, and have them find you, then we would (probably) be less reliant on genre foremost to organize books. I don’t think they would go away, but they would, hopefully, recede a little more in the background. Unfortunately, it seems like algorithms would be the way to address book discoverability, at least so far, and we already know how that turns out. (So far, technology has not solved this problem in any meaningful way, imho.)

From a reader’s point of view, and a writer’s, I think a utopian view of genre might eliminate some hand-wringing. Outside of bookselling, it doesn’t matter what genre your book is unless you want it to. In the process of writing this article, your book has been on a list of most anticipated queer, romance, and science fiction/fantasy books, basically all at the same time. I’m sure I’ve never had another clients’ book do that. I’m impressed. And I hope it leads to many, many different readers finding your book. It might be I am leaning toward a no-labels, everyone-wears-the-same-color-tunic utopian future, which I don’t exactly think is the best iteration, but it might be an all-or-nothing view. I don’t think our current genres necessarily need improvement. I think we just need, collectively, to understand that they are just labels and that’s it. They do not assign value.

IF: As a librarian, I’m wary of lionizing librarians too much—there’s a whole school of thought about “vocational awe” in librarianship and how it contributes to an image of librarians as people who can be everything to a community, providing everything from childcare to social work to life-saving medical interventions. At the same time, I really think that librarians have a key role to play in this genre utopia. Not only are algorithms a bias-riddled and readily gameable disaster, but they’re horrible at recommending books! We need people whose job involves knowing books, knowing people, and connecting them.

The more we think about genre, the less clear the whole concept becomes.

It is really neat to be anticipated on such completely different terms. Lots of different people seem to feel that my book is for them, and I hope they still feel that way when they read it. (Release jitters are very real that way.) But I find that once people have a book in their hands, they figure out the ways that it’s for them. They start to do the work, and your part of the work is done.

Kate, I feel like we just did 2,200 words on this, and I’ve said about all I have to say. Do you feel that we’ve answered the question of what genre is, and now nobody else has to weigh in on the topic, ever?

KM: Absolutely. Let’s consider the book on genre closed.

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Isaac Fellman is the Lambda Literary Award–winning author of Dead Collections and The Breath of the Sun. Dead Collections, about an archivist who is a vampire, came out on February 22, 2022. Isaac is an archivist, but not a vampire.