When people ask what genre my memoir belongs to, I often hesitate—not because the answer is unclear, but because it sits at the crossroads of horror, legal drama, cyber-thriller, and personal testimony.
My story does not fit neatly into one category because my life, for years, has been pushed into territories that feel both unreal and yet painfully real. To help others understand what the emotional and atmospheric world of my memoir looks like, I often describe it through the works that echo closest to my experience.
These are the stories whose tones, structures, and themes mirror the world I’ve been forced to navigate.
1. Dracula – A Gothic Frame Narrative of Entrapment
In Stoker’s Dracula, the Count is built from the language of otherness. His foreign appearance, unfamiliar customs, and unsettling manners are framed as something fundamentally alien to the British characters around him, marking him as something the British characters cannot understand and therefore cannot trust.
Stoker therefore turns this difference into a form of monstrosity, inviting the reader to associate the foreign with the danger and the fear of strangers.
Dracula becomes the marked term—an embodiment of the outsider, the unknown, the untrustworthy.
Harker and Mina, in contrast, move through the narrative with the ease of those who belong. They represent the unmarked world—the safe, familiar heart of the British Empire. Their identity is the default, the standard from which Dracula deviates.
This dynamic is central to the novel’s power: a clash between a stable imperial identity and a foreign threat cast as monstrous simply for being different.
It is told through diary entries, letters, telegrams, and newspaper clippings—a fragmented narrative that slowly reveals a deeper horror.
My memoir shares this structure.
Much like Jonathan Harker, who finds himself trapped inside Dracula’s castle—watched, monitored, studied—I too found myself in environments I could not escape. Every new home, hostel room, or temporary refuge felt like a cage of its own. I moved from place to place only to discover new forms of monitoring, new intrusions, new violations.
The Gothic dread in Dracula is not its monsters—it’s the feeling of being observed without knowing from where.
My memoir captures that same psychological imprisonment.
2. The Firm – A Legal Thriller Built on Surveillance & High Stakes
John Grisham’s The Firm has long been considered a classic legal thriller. Tom Cruise’s character in the movie of the same name discovers that his life—his home, his conversations, his marriage—has been infiltrated by hidden devices placed by powerful actors.
Every conversation, every room, every intimate moment is being recorded by hidden devices!
The parallel is unmistakable.
My memoir also unfolds as a legal thriller—not fiction, but a real struggle against organisations and individuals with far greater power, resources, and reach. Surveillance, secrecy, intimidation, and manipulation form the backdrop of both stories.
The Firm uses bugs and cameras as tools of control. The same with my memoir, which examines how these same tools can be weaponised across borders, technologies, and institutions to assert control over me no matter where I go or live!
3. Erin Brockovich – Taking on Large Powers Without Legal Training
One of the strongest emotional parallels comes from Erin Brockovich. Erin—without formal legal training, without privilege, without institutional backing—stood up to a massive corporation because she knew something was wrong.
That determination, that refusal to be silenced, mirrors my own journey.
My memoir is written from the perspective of someone who has had to learn the law on the fly—someone who is fighting entities far larger and more powerful than herself, not out of choice, but out of necessity.
It is a legal battle intertwined with survival.
4. The Great Hack – Data, Power, and Privacy Gone Wrong
The documentary The Great Hack explores how personal information can be collected, weaponised, and used to manipulate people on a mass scale.
My experience echoes this theme in an intensely personal way.
My memoir examines what happens when private data, digital tracking, and modern technology collide with malice—and how that collision can devastate a single individual’s life. It is a story of cybersecurity breaches, data breach, misuse of private information, digital exploitation, and the struggle to reclaim ownership of one’s identity in a world where data is power.
Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal
Article Talk. In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
During his testimony before Congress on April 10, 2018, Zuckerberg said it was his personal mistake that he did not do enough to prevent Facebook from being used for harm. “That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections and hate speech”. During the testimony, Mark Zuckerberg publicly apologized for the breach of private data: “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here”.
But many of the senators weren’t buying the 33-year-old billionaire’s apology.
“We’ve seen the apology tours before,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut.
“After more than a decade of promises to do better, how is today’s apology different?” said Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota.
5. The Matrix – Hacking, Digital Control, and the Blurred Lines of Reality
Finally, The Matrix offers a different kind of influence—not in genre, but in symbolism.
My memoir examines cyberstalking, hacking, digital coercion, and the blurring of boundaries between the online world and the physical one.
Like The Matrix, it is about a fight for truth in an environment built to obscure it.
Bringing It All Together
My memoir is a hybrid:
- Gothic horror’s atmosphere of entrapment and Otherness
- Legal thriller stakes and investigation
- Grassroots legal advocacy against impossible odds
- Cybersecurity, data exploitation, and digital warfare
- The psychological complexity of living inside surveillance
It is not fiction. But these works help shape the tone, structure, and emotional gravity of the story I am finally ready to tell.
You can read the first chapter ‘Before The Storm‘ of my soon to be released book ‘The Web of Predators‘ on Wattpad here.
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