Sheila Swift asked Lorena Cassady:

I agree with your opinion on "magical realism." My book would definitely fall into that category and I am struggling to make it fit nicely into a single genre. It is a memoir, but I tell it from a third person perspective with journal entries to give it texture. Should I experiment with different genres in Amazon to see which generates more interest?

Lorena Cassady I understand your dilemma! I understood my genre as I wrote the book, "Her Perilous Journey" -- one of the oldest genre's in the world -- The picaresque. My book is also a memoir, essentially, though I consider Regina IV a character that is free to think beyond the limitations of my actual life. Sometimes she does things I never would have done. Sometimes she does things I should have done. Sometimes she enters another reality. The book is about her, not me.

So, what I wrote is a picaresque memoir. That's what it is, but the book sellers aren't going to let me choose my own category. That lack of choice means that my readers will be robbed of understanding that my book comes out of a tradition, and that it should be seen in the context of of that tradition -- Voltaire's Candide, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, etc.

PS: Any memoirist that tells you that memoirs must be "true" have not read or understood the extensive research on the utter unreliability of memory, or the hundreds of philosophical discourses about the nature of "truth"!!

We writers must remember that genres have become a marketing tool solely for the convenience of those who have made books their business -- publishers, agents, and bookstores. Our choice is clear, if not stress producing. Do we write inside their corral or out on the free range? Are we artists or sheep? Baaaaa :)

This is only my opinion, but it makes me sad to think that you might actually alter the course of your writing "to make it fit nicely into a single genre." I want to read you, not them! Keep in touch!

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