Shze-Hui Tjoa on Her Debut Memoir

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

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Today, live from Exile in Bookville in Chicago, Shze-Hui Tjoa discusses her debut memoir, The Story Game, as well as excavating her childhood from buried trauma, crafting her sister into a listener character in the book, pushing past profound dissatisfaction, the submission process, making space for being corny, and more! Plus audience questions!

From the episode:

Shze-Hui Tjoa: This is a book about CPTSD. It’s a book about what it feels like to lose a lot of your memories due to dissociative PTSD, which is what I have. I am a very goal-driven person; I’m very task-oriented. So from the very beginning, I thought, I’m going to write a book. But I thought it was a very different book. I thought I was going to write a book about politics, a book about systemic change. […] I realized I didn’t have a lot of memories from my childhood. The more I tried to write about myself, the more I realized there was a weird paucity of material. I don’t remember a lot of my childhood; why is that?

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Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. Her debut, The Story Game (Tin House Books, 2024), is a genre-bending memoir about using storytelling to overcome the memory lapses of c-PTSD and recover personal identity.

Shze-Hui writes about and beyond herself – and is particularly interested in creative nonfiction that challenges formal conventions to speak the deepest possible truth to power. She has upcoming interviews or features in BOMB Magazine, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Millions, Poets & Writers magazine, Between the Covers podcast, and elsewhere. Her work has been listed as notable in three successive issues of The Best American Essays (2021-23).

Shze-Hui is currently a nonfiction editor at Sundog Lit, where she works to uplift writers from different backgrounds and bring them into conversation. Her career has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop (USA), Ceriph Mentorship Programme (Singapore), Disquiet International (Portugal), and VONA Voices (USA), among other organizations.