The One With All the Genres

This week on Chapter One, Scene One, we kicked off a new mini-episode series all about genre. Spoiler: "book club fiction" is not a genre, literary fiction labels are mostly a marketing flex, and covers absolutely lie.

We started with the basics: what is a genre even doing? The short answer is that it's a contract. When someone tells you a book is a romance, you expect a love story and a happily ever after. A thriller promises tension, danger, and maybe a body. A mystery gives you a puzzle. When a book breaks that contract, you either get pleasantly surprised or you get mad that you spent money on something that wasn't what it claimed to be. (Ask Laura about the pink-covered book with the dead body and the old lady brothel.)

Then we got into the categories publishers actually use, and where they fall apart.

The spectrum (as we see it)

• Commercial fiction: plot-driven, most genre fiction lives here
• Upmarket fiction: character development plus plot, things like Remarkably Bright Creatures or The Most Fun We Ever Had
• Literary fiction: character, theme, and writing style above all else. Ann Patchett territory. Not Gone Girl.

The ongoing arguments

• Is Gone Girl literary fiction? Katya says yes, or at least literary thriller. Laura says no, and also that it's garbage. Michelle loved it. We will not be resolving this today.
• Where the Crawdads Sing: Michelle loved the book and the movie, Katya defends the nature writing, Laura has tried to block it entirely from her memory.
• "Book club fiction" is not a genre. It's a vibe. It means the book will generate discussion, which honestly any book can do, including Fifty Shades of Grey.
• "Women's fiction" is a marketing category, not a genre. There is no men's fiction because all fiction is already presumed to be for men. We noticed.

Which genres survive adaptation

Romance and thrillers tend to translate well to screen. Literary fiction is a harder lift because so much of it lives inside a character's head, and you need a really strong performance to carry that. We also got into Reese Witherspoon's book club being less of a book club and more of an adaptation pipeline, Harlan Coben's massive Netflix deal, and why People We Meet on Vacation would have worked better as a series than a movie.

Coming up in this series

Over the next few episodes, we're going deeper on individual genres: domestic thrillers, unreliable narrators, literary fiction, classics, retellings (yes, Bridget Jones's Diary and Clueless count), and romance. We'll decide once and for all what makes a genre, whether those labels hold up, and what the hell to do with the "next Gone Girl" marketing.

Final verdict this week: read what you want to read. If the story sounds good, pick it up. But maybe read the blurb first.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Find all our links at linktr.ee/chapteronesceneone.