Late at night over hushed whispers and bowls of chips, my middle school friends and I would ask each other question after question: Who do you have a crush on? Would you rather do this or that? Or if someone boldly chose a dare instead, we’d egg them on to do something we deemed outrageous like eating a spoonful of wasabi or texting a cute boy. Over truth or dare, we’d stay up all night, urging each other to divulge everything and anything, continuing the age-old tradition of the sleepover.
Shze-Hui Tjoa’s debut memoir from Tin House, The Story Game, features a very different kind of sleepover. In this iteration, Tjoa floats in the darkness of her childhood room in Singapore, speaking to her younger sister, Nin, who is preserved in Tjoa’s imagination as a six-year-old while Tjoa is 26. Akin to sleepovers, Tjoa exchanges deep secrets with her sister, digging into the most intimate parts of her life, all at the urging of Nin, who invokes the story game: “Let’s play our game again, so that you remember.” While this story game functions similarly to truth or dare in that both are acts of divulging secrets, Tjoa’s version is different in that this story game is actually an act of healing.
While still an act of divulging secrets, this storytelling diverges from our understanding of a sleepover in the way that her childhood room acts as a space to recede into mentally. These stories urge Tjoa to remember what has happened to her and to come to terms with it.
The Story Game is divided into three sections: Year One, Years Two and Three, and Year Four. Each section is made up of several stories, interspersed with “Room” sub-sections, covering the aforementioned discussions between Tjoa and Nin. In Year One, Tjoa details experiences ranging from her trip to Bali to her brief stint with ecotourism. When Nin complains that these stories sound like “…news stories! Reporting facts,” Tjoa deflects her criticisms, telling her that she’d “rather [her] stories in this room have some sort of… bigger vision to them. A political direction,” reflecting how she is not yet ready to face her trauma.
At the insistence of Nin, Years Two and Three dig deeper into Tjoa’s memories, yet a political angle still occasionally taints the stories she tells. The most critical part of this section occurs when she reveals her deepest trauma: the abuse she experienced, as a child, at the hands of her parents, who wished to transform her into a piano protege. In order to cope with this abuse, her mind separates from her body. She transforms these two parts of herself into the characters, Mind and Body, allowing her to discuss her abuse from a distance using third-person narration:
Body’s parents only want the best. This is important to remember, going forward: Body’s parents are ordinary, good-and-bad people. Like most parents, they actively want to benefit their child. They care inordinately for Body’s more visible counterpart: Mind.
Finally in Year Four, Tjoa emerges from the room to face the real world, grappling with the remnants of her marriage and her fractured relationship with her real younger sister, both of which are negatively impacted by her childhood piano-playing, which causes her to struggle with forming and maintaining personal relationships.
With the resurgence of 2010s culture on social media, including TikToks on how to dress in the 2014 Tumblr soft grunge aesthetic, Tjoa’s story from Year One, “Hui’s Third Story: The Sad Girls Variations,” feels especially pertinent today. This section spoke to me because, like Tjoa, I too had a fascination with the “Melancholy Tumblr Girl,” whose “long pale limbs, prominent cheekbones. Big mournful eyes that look permanently brimmed over” hypnotized me as a teenager. Like Tjoa, I “knew that I would never quite qualify as a Melancholy Tumblr Girl. I was too chubby and too short, too prone to unglamorous physical realities like sweat. Too easily enthused; too easily intrigued.”
Yet, there lies the difficulty of the Melancholy Tumblr Girl: we may romanticize women like Lana Del Rey, or in the case of Tjoa, Simone Weil, yet we can never be them. As Tjoa points out, “the truth is that in every way that counted, she behaved differently than an actually depressed person would.” Their sadness is of a curated variety, Tjoa argues, meant to project a certain persona, rather than to reflect lived experiences with sadness.
This section forced me to reckon with my own fascination with sad girls, like Lorde and Marina and the Diamonds, and how deeply, in 2014–2015, I was entrenched in the Tumblr soft grunge aesthetic—marble print accessories, American Apparel matching sets, et al. It made me reflect on how this aesthetic and interest impacted my own ideas of beauty, coolness, and self-worth. While there is nothing wrong with resurrecting certain parts of this time period—for example, grainy photos of Los Angeles, or oil-slick shoes—it’s important to acknowledge the negative impact it and the idealization of mental illness had on people’s ideas of themselves.
Tjoa ends this story positing that perhaps the wellness woman is the new sad girl in that she suggests wellness looks like happiness, the way the sad girl “misinformed me that depression looked like sadness.” The criticism Tjoa has for both is how psychiatric health cannot express itself only in one way.
The Story Game is a complicated text that covers many of Tjoa’s struggles. Each step of the way, Nin pushes her to heal, ultimately ending with Tjoa addressing the reader for the first time, saying, “I still have a lot of work to do on myself.” From the abuse she faced as a child to her fascination with sad girls, this memoir speaks to the way that we are a culmination of everything that has ever happened to us as shown by how each story impacts her view of herself and the world around her.
Without giving away too much, I will say that the sections on her abuse are the most difficult to read. From Body refusing to eat in the hopes that it’ll become too weak to play the piano to how forcing Body to sit at the piano for so many hours resulted in severe scoliosis, these sections force the reader to witness the extremities her parents put her through in order to master the piano. This section deserves to be read firsthand, which is why I chose to not delve too deeply into it and to focus on other parts of this memoir instead.
As Tjoa confronts her past, she inches closer to being able to live in the present and to leave her childhood room behind permanently. The Story Game is ultimately hopeful as Tjoa gives us a glimpse into her development toward reconciliation with those who matter most to her—her now 27-year-old sister, Nin, and her husband, Thomas. For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know and Jami Nakamura Lin’s The Night Parade, The Story Game is a must-read. Like the two former memoirs, it offers the reader a chance to heal alongside the author.
*
