Nonfiction isn't false, but who say it's true?
Naomi Klein, Lulu Miller, and Rebecca Romney wrote a certain kind of book — I call it the Obsessive Investigation
If you read Part 1, you saw the cold pitch that landed my first external publication. Now here’s the essay itself, plus new reflections since writing it.
The essay identifies a nonfiction micro-genre, the Obsessive Investigation. These are hybrid works straddling memoir, cultural criticism, and detective narrative, and they each “emerge from an author’s need to make sense of something that won’t stop tugging at her mind.”
Since publication, I’ve found other candidates. Foremost is Tiffany Watt Smith’s Bad Friend, which tackles female friendship through a personal, historical, and cultural lens. A friendship she thought would endure was falling apart. Watt Smith felt a mix of jealousy, anger, sadness — and then embarrassment. She began to think “about the other friendships I had lost” (which were “more than a few”). The thought arose: “I was bad at this. A bad friend.” This launches the book’s intellectual inquiry, which takes us through many well-known figures — Aristotle, Montaigne, Phillis Wheatley — but even more unknowns in making sense of our complicated experiences of friendship. Watt Smith resurrects the friendships of regular people as told by archival court records, diaries, and letters: a sixteenth-century London midwife, 19th-century women’s college students, 20th-century civil rights workers. And throughout, she weaves in personal history. It’s a captivating journey.
These other candidates I haven’t read yet; I’ve filed them on my (too long) TBR list:
Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City; “at once an investigation into works of art that arise out of the condition of loneliness, and the record of a more personal quest to master the difficult ‘art of being alone,’” per The Guardian.
Cody Delistraty’s The Grief Cure; after his mother’s death from cancer, the author “seeks out the researchers, technologists, therapists, marketers, and communities around the world who may be able to cure the pain of loss in novel ways,” per the publisher’s blurb.
Here it is, originally published under the title “Nonfiction Isn’t False, but Who Says It’s True?” by Electric Literature on November 7, 2025.
Nonfiction is a strange term, isn’t it? Defined through fiction’s absence, the label offers denial rather than affirmation: What you’re about to read is not false. Yet is it true? According to whom? How do they know?
No universal answers exist for nonfiction—the genre is too sprawling, too catch-all—but examining how individual books answer these questions can reveal hidden patterns. In the case of three recent books, the answers suggest the emergence of a new micro-genre—one where the author explicitly narrates how and why they come by the truths they’re claiming.
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Earlier this year, I raced through Rebecca Romney’s Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, preferring that slightly girlish, jewel-tone tome to all others on my nightstand. I thought: I haven’t been this enraptured since Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger. Then a month later, I came across Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller and binged it with the same voracious energy.
At first glance, my enthusiastic reaction seemed like the only thing these books had in common. Published over a span of five years—Miller’s Why Fish in 2020, Klein’s Doppelganger in 2023, and Romney’s JAB in 2025—they cover vastly different terrain. Why Fish follows ichthyologist David Starr Jordan through science and disaster. Doppelganger traces a cultural history of doubles. JAB recovers the women who influenced Austen’s fiction. I often start nonfiction with interest, only to feel overfed midway through, stuffed with so many names, dates, and details that I’ve lost my appetite. So the fact that I devoured these three gnawed at me. That gnawing turned into an inquiry: Why were these different? I put them side-by-side, and it hit me: These books aren’t just about forgotten women writers, or cultural doubles, or ichthyology. They’re about the authors’ obsessive journeys into these subjects—journeys launched not from expertise, not even curiosity, but something rarer: a sense of necessity. An instinct that if they can understand this sliver of the world, they might understand themselves.
Each book opens with a personal rupture that sends the author searching for explanations. For Miller, the end of a relationship plunges her into a depression so deep she questions the point of living. In that state, she latches onto the story of a nineteenth-century ichthyologist who rebuilt his fish collection again and again—first, after it was destroyed by fire, then by earthquake. His near-maniacal persistence draws Miller like a beacon, igniting Why Fish’s study on resilience, obsession, and the peril of mistaking drive for moral principle.
Naomi Klein’s rupture is stranger: Years of being confused for the feminist intellectual Naomi Wolf—the “Other Naomi”—devolves into a crisis when Wolf morphs into a MAGA firebrand and Klein begins to receive vitriolic attacks for the “Other Naomi’s” views. In Doppelganger, Klein takes this uncanny doubling as an entry point into a wide-ranging intellectual and cultural investigation of mirrors, shadows, and evil-twin tropes, providing a lens through which Klein probes her own disintegrating identity.
Rebecca Romney’s crisis arrives when she encounters a rare Frances Burney volume while appraising a client’s book collection. This spurs the uncomfortable realization that, as a reader, she had reflexively dismissed Burney, along with every other woman writer of Austen’s day. Romney’s reckoning with her own bias propels Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, which, in the course of profiling eight forgotten women writers, probes bigger questions: How did the canon come to elevate just one woman, and how did a feminist like Romney come to accept that winnowing without pause?
Page by page, the books stitch knowledge together from fragments and claim authority through process rather than credentials. There’s a muscly physicality to them; we see not just what the authors uncover but how they uncover it. This is one way nonfiction can cohere: not through a particular subject or discipline, but by showing the reader how truth takes shape.
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Research, the accumulation of minutiae, the tap-tap-tap of search queries, form the arcs of these books. The investigations play out in libraries and on laptops. Reversals occur. We sit alongside the authors as they learn their starting expectations were naive, their subjects more elusive than they’d seemed. These are, unexpectedly, detective stories that unfold through primary sources and marginalia. The authors lean into this conceit to varying degrees: JAB features an explicit Sherlock Holmes allegory; all three dangle clues and cliffhangers.
This straddling of memoir, cultural criticism, and detective narrative means these books don’t neatly fit any existing genre. All emerge from an author’s need to make sense of something that won’t stop tugging at her mind. The writer burrows into her obsession like a miner chasing a vein of ore. These shared characteristics are so distinctive that I see the works forming a cohesive group, a micro-genre I’m calling the Obsessive Investigation, in which the author’s intellectual inquiry supplies the book’s structural engine. The pursuit is the story.
This micro-genre is defined not by its glittering surface but by its undercurrent: the deep tow of the author’s inquiry; their need to know and the idiosyncratic research that follows, which itself pushes plot and insight. In the Obsessive Investigations, we see forces that usually stay hidden. Most research-heavy nonfiction conceals the personal circumstances that drove the author to write—the breakup, the identity crisis, the chance encounter that couldn’t be dismissed. We don’t learn what’s happening in the author’s life while they write, even though it inevitably shapes what they see and how they see it. But in these books, those forces are laid bare. This is what distinguishes these works from traditional nonfiction—their willingness to show the author’s subjectivity from the start, and how that subjectivity drives them through facts and source materials to reach particular insights. We have front-row seats to a mind in motion.
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This micro-genre’s emergence belongs to a larger cultural shift. As a society, we’ve turned away from institutional expertise in favor of loosely networked, first-person nodes of influence. Authority has become less like a marble statue and more like a quilt—provisional, hand-stitched, showing its seams. The Obsessive Investigation books sit squarely inside this shift. They don’t deliver meaning from on high; they show meaning getting made.
Scroll through your social media feed of choice and you’ll see the ripples: confessional-style #booktok reviews (“This book broke me!”) with the viral power that traditional reviews lack; parents posting child-rearing wisdom learned in real time to thousands of followers; homeowners sharing DIY renovations that spark new design trends. These are ordinary people building authority through doing, redistributing their ground-up expertise through networks that demand no credentials.
Today’s influencers preach and prove a do-it-yourself approach to nearly everything. Including, more recently, intellectual pursuits. Substack, the newsletter platform where long-form writers bypass editorial gatekeepers to build audiences directly, lends itself to this: Take a stroll, and you’ll encounter countless articles on how to research, how to take notes, how to read Great Books, how to self-study intellectual disciplines like art history and philosophy. The generically-named Sarah’s Substack, which typically earns three hundred likes or fewer per post, racked up 22,000 likes over the summer for “How to Start Researching as a Hobby.”
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Like those Substackers, the Obsessive Investigation authors are laypeople forging their own paths. Klein and Miller are journalists, yes, but these aren’t reported books synthesizing expert interviews. They’re original inquiries built on trial-and-error, persistence, and hard work. Implicit is the notion that there is no magic to it. Any of us might undertake our own version of the obsessive investigation, if we can muster the motivation and grit.
Which is not to detract from their accomplishment: These authors have made intellectual inquiries surprisingly readable. I, a serial did-not-finisher, found myself reaching the acknowledgements the honest way: by simply reading all the pages that came before. With alchemical grace, each writer turns mundane research into narrative gold—scouring digital archives, chasing footnotes, finding hidden links. The dangling promise of an insight just around the corner gives these “nonfictions” the propulsive quality of detective work. In JAB, for instance, Romney points out questions that surface as she delves into forgotten writers’ lives and then cuts away, building intrigue and momentum. In Doppelganger, Klein punctuates the tale of Naomi Wolf’s political transformation with anxious reflections from her own life that expose their intertwined unraveling. Why Fish, the most lyrical of the three, drizzles unsettling imagery over the opening chapters, hinting that beneath the plucky, wholesome story of Jordan’s scientific achievements, all is not as it seems. Line by line, the authors let us trail their thinking, reinforcing the sense that we’re intimate witnesses—Watsons, even—to each discovery.
***
Central to the Obsessive Investigation is the assumption that these authors, none formally trained in their subject, can undertake intellectual inquiries on their own terms. Miller wades through Jordan’s writings—“more than fifty books, all told, and hundreds of other texts”—to find the pattern of his resilience; Klein traces doppelganger motifs through folklore and film; and Romney pores over 18th-century literary reviews. Each writer charts their own syllabus in pursuit of insight. History, literature, and culture become intellectual commons—open territory that anyone with curiosity and initiative can explore and interpret independently, drawing conclusions without prior authorization.
In claiming this intellectual territory, these writers also claim visibility for themselves. Their self-directed research is the story, with the author-as-investigator anchoring the narrative. This approach has roots in works by Susan Orlean and John McPhee, who feature as the narrators of books like 1998’s The Orchid Thief and 1990’s Looking for a Ship. Orlean and McPhee, in turn, refined 1960s New Journalism, which broke with past tradition by foregrounding the journalist’s presence. But whereas Orlean, McPhee, and New Journalists like Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe immersed themselves in the social worlds they chronicled, these Obsessive Investigations retreat inward. Their fieldwork takes place in archives and in their own minds; their discoveries are mediated through text and thought rather than personal encounter.
Elif Batuman’s 2010 essay collection, The Possessed, is closer kin. In the essays, Batuman dramatizes her Stanford graduate research on Russian literature. “I was sucked in, deeper than I ever expected,” Batuman writes of her obsessions with Babel, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, anticipating the investigative compulsion that Romney, Miller, and Klein would report in their books. But The Possessed diverges in fundamental ways: Batuman, with her PhD credentials, investigated her literary heroes from within the academy’s exclusive tower. And rather than beginning with a personal rupture that demands investigation, she starts with a clear agenda: to reclaim literary criticism for people who love to read, which she does through explorations of the lives of the Russian writers she reveres alongside their works. Yet what makes The Possessed worth considering here is Batuman’s insistence that author biography matters to literary meaning—Elena Ferrante be damned. And not just the life stories of Russian writers, but her own, too. She weaves in her fish-out-of-water adolescence as a first-generation Turkish immigrant in New Jersey, the odd jobs she pursued during her lean student years, her crushes and romances—personal anecdotes that somehow all related back to Russian literature and shaped what she saw in the texts. By making her experiences prominent, Batuman shows that personal stakes can deepen rather than compromise intellectual work. It’s the implicit argument of the Klein-Miller-Romney books as well: The author matters.
***
Tracing what these books share, I keep coming back to the fact that Klein, Miller, and Romney—and Batuman before them—are all women. Maybe it’s just coincidence: A majority of authors and readers in the US these days are reportedly women, and as a woman myself, I might be over-reading. But these books teach us to be alert to the questions that spring to mind, to worry at threads and see where they lead.
I pulled one such thread and discovered this: In the 1980s, feminist theorist Donna Haraway critiqued traditional intellectual discourse that elevates the voices of white men above everyone else. She called it a “god trick”: the suppression of authorial presence, in which a writer’s voice appears to float above the page like an omniscient, unattached observer. At the time, that posture belonged exclusively to white men; they were the only group whose right and authority to speak was taken for granted. Others—women, minorities—had to prove their authority, defending the narrow ground on which they, as situated, earthbound individuals, were permitted to speak. The “godlike” white men spoke for everyone, while the marginalized writers spoke only for themselves.
The “god trick” names a tone that has always bothered me—one I recognized instantly but never had words for. It’s that because-I-said-so voice in the literary criticism I read in college—a tone that brooked no dissent, couldn’t even imagine it. It’s less prevalent now but hasn’t disappeared. A recent Emily Dickinson biographer wrote from on high even as he made wildly subjective judgments, like his observation (in reference to Dickinson’s esteem for a Longfellow poem) that the “quantity of mediocre writing she took seriously can be alarming.” (Passive voice—the preferred style of gods.) I recognized it too in some partners I worked for as a young lawyer, who would never concede any limit to their understanding. If they saw something a certain way, well that was the only way to see it.
Which is perhaps why I devoured Klein, Romney, and Miller. They satisfied an unknown hunger for writing that didn’t talk down to me, that treated me as a peer. Unlike traditional nonfiction, these authors center their subjectivity, reminding us that individual perspective shapes inquiry. They present not the truth but their truth. And by laying bare their motivations, methods, and mediations, they invite us to judge for ourselves. It’s a nourishing shift.
***
But here’s where it gets complicated. As we increasingly embrace the authority of laypeople who show their work, we can—and should—still value traditional modes of expertise. This is not an either/or proposition. Yet our current moment treats it as such, struggling to make space for both. While Klein, Miller, and Romney represent the empowering aspect of our culture’s shift toward bottom-up knowledge, there is also a darker side, surfacing as a blanket rejection of expertise itself.
Respect for institutions is at an all-time low. What once belonged to experts—diets, medical treatments, even how we should live—has migrated to podcasters and self-styled wellness gurus. At the same time, conspiracy theories once relegated to the margins have gone mainstream, convincing many people that the earth is flat, that elections are rigged, that deadly tragedies are staged “false flags.” While such beliefs can be dismissed by most of us as ludicrous, others hit closer to home. Many of us share a lingering suspicion that we’re being jerked around like pawns, even if we bitterly disagree about who’s doing the jerking and why.
In the midst of this collapse of trust, how could we not shrink inward, grasping for things we can control? The pandemic intensified this instinct, training us to trust only our own tight circles, to retreat into family units or “pods.” We’re still reeling from this loss of orientation, and the result is a crippling inability to calibrate our focus—to triage our anxieties, to separate the trivial from the urgent.
“It has often struck me,” writes Klein, reflecting on her fixation with her far-right doppelganger Naomi Wolf, “that I am hardly the only one who has turned away from large fears in favor of more manageable obsessions.” She faults herself for writing a book about her doppelganger crisis when there are so many societal ills she might have chosen to confront—the climate crisis looms largest. Yet even self-reproach can’t snap her out of her private labyrinth of doubles back to the broader world.
I’m guilty of the same retreat, though in smaller ways. I’ve all but stopped keeping up with the news. Instead, I bury myself in research projects, digging through past lives and cultural histories—terrain that feels safer, more containable than the sprawling crises of the present. Though this questing isn’t ostensibly about our current anxieties, I have a nagging suspicion that it’s born of a desperation for meaning, for a way to understand this self-destructive species we belong to by working backwards.
That shared urge is what draws me to these books: They, too, reach back into history and culture for answers. Miller investigates Jordan’s obsessive resilience to understand her own depression. Klein traces doppelganger myths to make sense of the “Other Naomi” and our conspiracy-addled moment. Romney excavates forgotten women writers to understand how exclusion becomes canon. Each uses the past as a lens for illuminating the present. This intellectual form of inquiry offers a private retreat—and a semblance of control—in an increasingly arbitrary and untethered world.
Nonfiction has long posed as objective truth while masking an author’s motives and methods as if its contents were inevitable. The Obsessive Investigation offers something more honest: a personal perspective, a mind in motion. Therein lies its power. These books meet a hunger that feels distinctly of our time: to follow thought as it unfolds, to see the forces that shape it, to watch meaning being made instead of delivered. They remind us that truth is not a verdict from on high but a composition shaped by the very act of seeking it.
And there it is. I’d love to know your reactions, and whether any other nonfiction titles strike you as belonging to this group — or as destabilizing it.
Thanks for reading.
Stay curious,
Laura
From the archive, two posts that deal with subjects foregrounded in the essay you’ve just read: Donna Haraway’s “god trick,” and Why Fish Don’t Exist as a key to criticizing our current taxonomy of mental disorders
This thought is amazing:
"Nonfiction is a strange term, isn’t it? Defined through fiction’s absence, the label offers denial rather than affirmation: What you’re about to read is not false. Yet is it true? According to whom? How do they know?"
I'd never really thought about it that way. Sometimes an author exploring the world, especially in micro-genre you define, is neither true nor not true. It's just experience.
I love this essay.