The House of Doors intertwines fact and fiction in its storytelling, setting real-world figures like W. Somerset Maugham (imagined in House of Doors as Willie, a nickname Maugham used in real life) against characters like Lesley Hamlyn, whose name comes from two characters in Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree, the 1926 collection of short stories based on the events Willie experienced during The House of Doors. Even tracking the provenance of the two main characters of the novel thus emerges as a multilayered process, fact upon fiction upon fact. Tan likens this process, which originated from reading Maugham’s “The Letter,” which is based on the Ethel Proudlock case, as “reverse engineering” (Ermelino, Louisa. “Enter Tan Twan Eng’s New Novel, ‘The House of Doors.’” Publishers Weekly, 21 July 2023). What emerges from this project of engineering—a term that is evocative of the layered sense of The House of Doors’s story-within-a-story structure—is a sense of history and fiction so intermingled as to be inextricable from one another. What matters, this mélange suggests, is how stories are told.

Tan’s narrators regularly turn back to self-conscious articulations of the knowledge that they are telling stories as opposed to reciting facts.