To call an essay unconventional is a bit of a redundancy, in that the essay typically resists convention. At any length it is a mongrel genre that roves freely across the territory of other genres. Book-length essays are somewhat rarer, and maybe even wilder. They tend to be slim books that somehow do everything, that borrow from journalism, from poetry, from memoir, and from a range of academic disciplines. They draw from historical practices, too, from the commonplace book, from the Japanese zuihitsu, from the African American art of oratory, and from Montaigne’s Essais.

I have collected here 10 book-length essays that appeal to me in their style, and that informed my writing of Having and Being Had, which I think of as a book-length essay. I have left out works that read like essays but that are entirely fictional, such as Claire-Louise Bennett’s wonderful Pond, and Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband. I have also left out works that were published as poetry, such as A Pillow Book, Suzanne Buffam’s lovely homage to the zuihitsu of the 10th-century writer Sei Shōnagon. Even so, many of these books are only arguably essays. I find all of them difficult to describe and hard to categorise. This is a genre made up of works that frustrate the very concept of genre.

1. Holy Land by DJ Waldie
This book artfully documents the planning and construction of a blue-collar suburb in California, as well as a life lived in that suburb from infancy to middle age. It is composed of several hundred numbered sections, most no longer than a page and some no longer than a sentence, all of them quietly poetic. One reads: “In a suburb that is not exactly middle class, the necessary illusion is predictability.” This work invites the reader to consider how our lives are shaped by the structures we live within, and to wonder what it might mean to live a “good life”, in both material and spiritual terms. These questions were often on my mind as I was writing Having and Being Had.

2. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany
This book is an essay in two parts, and it makes its argument in two different ways, once through a personal recollection of sexual encounters in Times Square, and then through an academic exploration of how gentrification degrades urban life. The essay genre is sometimes divided into two major categories – the formal, or academic essay, and the informal, or personal essay. Here the author leverages both, the two halves making one intriguing book. It is a moving elegy for a Times Square that is now lost, and a spirited appreciation of the porn cinemas and peep shows that brought together men of various races and classes.

3. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Written in a series of free-standing paragraphs that range from quotation to anecdote to meditation, this book choreographs an inventive dance between theoretical questions and lived experience. The lightly sketched backdrop for that dance is a love story between two people undergoing transformation. The author is pregnant and her partner has just begun to take testosterone. He is not transitioning from female to male – “I’m not on my way anywhere,” he says – just choosing to live between genders in a new way. Meanwhile, the author wonders if there isn’t “something inherently queer about pregnancy itself”. This intellectual romp through pregnancy, new motherhood, and queer family-making leaves the reader with a life-affirming sense of expanded possibilities.

4. The Women by Hilton Als
In this three-part reckoning with race, gender, and sexuality, Als writes about his mother, an immigrant from Barbados, about Malcolm X’s mother, about the brilliant Harvard-educated “fag hag” Dorothy Dean, and about the writer Owen Dodson, who was his mentor and his lover. The book is both a love song and a cautionary tale, as the author identifies with all these complicated people, who exceeded the confines of their own identities, but is also determined not to live out their fates as his own.

5. Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger
This book explores the life and work of Barbara Loden, who based her film Wanda on the life of a woman she had never met, a woman whose life was not like her own, but whose story offered a way to tell the story of her own experience as a woman. In turn, the author finds her own experience, and her mother’s, in both Barbara Loden’s life and in Wanda. The true pleasure of reading this book is in the way Léger writes, which feels like the unfolding of consciousness itself.

6. The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Dismayed by the artlessness of her childhood diaries, Julavits decided to write a diary that would read like a work of art. The result subverts many of the conventions of a diary – the entries are not in chronological order, for one, and the book is far less tedious than an actual diary. Each entry begins with “Today I …” and many are charmingly eclectic, as in, “Today I found a Rolodex in a trash can at JFK”. This work is devoted to style and sensibility, and the prose is masterfully rendered, with every sentence perfect in its own way.

7. The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly
Like a commonplace book, this is a loosely organised collection of quotations, aphorisms, dreams and questions. The sentences are gloriously wrought and the prose is full of music. What holds the fragments together is a midlife reckoning in which the author interrogates his relationship to pleasure, comfort and material goods. “Unsatisfied Materialists,” he writes, “we are as common as clay.” Not quite a materialist, but close enough to feel the danger, I was drawn to this book during my own midlife reckoning.

8. This Is Not a Novel by David Markson
Something of the everyday frustration of working as a writer is captured for me in an Amazon review of This is Not A Novel, which begins, “This is not really a novel …” This book is an exquisite meditation on art-making and mortality, rendered in a series of carefully curated details from the lives and deaths of various artists. Throughout, the author offers suggestions of what this work might be – a “heap of riddles”, “an epic poem”, “a mural”, “an autobiography” and, most intriguing to me, “a kind of verbal fugue”.

9. Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Dictee captures the haunting reverberations of colonialism in a collage of photographs, film stills, maps, letters, bits of dictation, blank spaces and passages of prose written in many styles and several languages. The women who appear, sometimes glancingly, include Joan of Arc, the Korean revolutionary Yu Kwan-sun, the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone and Cha’s mother Hyun Soon Huo, who was born in China to Korean exiles. Dictee is a challenging read, but this book is about the struggle to speak, to claim a language and to make sense of a fractured world.

10. Calamities by Renee Gladman
Composed of a delightful series of diary-like entries that all start with the phrase, “I began the day …”, this book offers glimpses into the everyday life of a writer, but obliquely. The mind of the author is more openly revealed. Heady, playful and occasionally abstract, this reads as an essay in parts, rather than a collection of them. “It’s funny to call them essays anyway,” Gladman says of the work, “because they fail as essays. They don’t sustain an argument, they don’t go anywhere, they don’t conclude anything.” In writing Having and Being Had, I found myself drawn to this sort of failure, the failure to do what is expected – the sort of failure that is, in the context of the essay, a success.

• Having and Being Had by Eula Biss is published by Faber & Faber. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.