how to write an autobiography alexander chee

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Writing as Drag: Alexander Chee’s Essays Consider the Novelist’s Craft

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By J.W. McCormack

• June 27, 2018

HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL Essays By Alexander Chee 280 pp. Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Paper, $15.99.

“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is a disarming title for an essay collection by Alexander Chee, given that he’s fresh from the success of a novel that on the face of it was anything but autobiographical. That book, the justly celebrated epic “The Queen of the Night” (2016), was an operatic drama that followed a fictional 19th-century soprano as she rises to fame in Paris and navigates Second Empire intrigue on a scale to make Victor Hugo proud. What could be farther from Chee’s own life? But one of the things you learn in this collection is that, for most writers, “novels are accidents at their start,” an answer to questions the author never knew to ask. In Chee’s telling, the writer’s life always lurks just beyond the page, and not only in the way that Gustave Flaubert was Madame Bovary or Henry James the prepubescent heroine of “What Maisie Knew.” In a revealing essay called “Girl,” Chee recalls his first time in drag, on Halloween in the Castro in 1990. The cosmetic transformation allowed him to collapse his identities as a gay man, a Korean-American and a New England transplant into a pleasing totality: “This beauty I find when I put on drag, then: It is made up of these talismans of power, a balancing act of the self-hatreds of at least two cultures, an act I’ve engaged in my whole life, here on the fulcrum I make of my face.”

If writing, too, is a form of drag for Chee, it is also an act of mystic invocation and transference. In an essay recounting his career as a professional Tarot reader, he asks of the cards what readers ask of stories: “the feeling of something coming true.” Still, few books fit the bill of “autobiographical novel” better than this collection, which is arranged in rough coming-of-age chronology, from the author’s sexual awakening as an exchange student in Mexico (“a summer of wanting impossible things”) to the death of his father at 43, following a car accident, when Chee was 15; his beginnings as a writer at Wesleyan University, where he studied under Annie Dillard; his tenure in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS crisis; the publication of his (explicitly autobiographical) first novel, “Edinburgh,” in 2001; and his maturity as a reader, writer and instructor who longs, in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, to lead his students “to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war.” The book ends with the beautiful sentiment, cribbed from an email Chee wrote his students after the election of Donald Trump, that “a novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.”

Chee leavens his heaviest topics — the decimation of the gay community in the late 1980s and early ’90s, the repressed memory of sexual abuse that inspired “Edinburgh” — with charming episodes like his stint as a waiter at William and Pat Buckley’s Park Avenue maisonette, a job that prompted a crisis of conscience given Buckley’s infamous proposal to brand AIDS patients on their wrists and buttocks. (On another catering assignment, this one at the Buckleys’ home in Connecticut, he glimpses Buckley heading to the pool to skinny-dip with a male staffer.) There is also an account of his worshipful, nigh-religious encounter with Chloë Sevigny in the elevator of a building both are subletting; a chummy reminiscence of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he attends against his better judgment only to wind up a convert who readily defends M.F.A. programs against their critics (“It is not an escape from the real world, to my mind, but a confrontation with it”); and an essay about planting a rose garden outside his Brooklyn apartment that affords him the opportunity to discuss the writing process under the guise of horticulturist.

Other essays have the kind of grandiose titles you’d expect from a more traditional book on craft: “The Writing Life,” “The Autobiography of My Novel,” “On Becoming an American Writer.” And, really, why write a book about writing if you can’t occasionally hold forth with such injunctions as “Think of a dream with the outer surface of a storm”? Yet even at his most mystical, Chee is generous; these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity. Chee is refreshingly open about his sometimes liberating, sometimes claustrophobic sense of exceptionality. As a child he reads X-Men comics and wishes for psychic powers; as an adult he finds his ambitious first efforts as a writer at odds with prevailing literary trends. Throughout, Chee endeavors to catch himself at a distance and reckon, ever humble and bracingly honest, with the slippery terrain of memory, identity and love. “We are not what we think we are,” he writes. “The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea.”

Of the stories Chee tells, one deserves special attention: “After Peter,” a memorialization of a lover and mentor who died of AIDS in 1994. Chee chronicles their involvement with activist organizations like Act Up/SF and Queer Nation in the long years before the advent of protease inhibitors. “Why am I telling this story?” he asks rhetorically. “The men I wanted to follow into the future are dead. … I feel I owe them my survival.” He reminds us that whomever a writer pictures as his audience, he is also writing into absence, standing in testimony for the sake of the dead. Like most of the essays here, “After Peter” pulses with urgency, one piece from a life in restless motion. It is not necessary to agree that “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” is itself a kind of novel in order to appreciate that Chee has written a moving and personal tribute to impermanence, a wise and transgressive meditation on a life lived both because of and in spite of America, a place where, he writes, “you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.”

J. W. McCormack is the digital media editor of The Believer. His reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books Daily, The Baffler, Bomb and Vice.

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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays Audio CD – Unabridged, December 4, 2018

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An essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist-and how we form our identities in life and in art.

As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as masterful by Roxane Gay, incendiary by the New York Times, and brilliant by the Washington Post . With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he is sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation's history, including his father's death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing-Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley-the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh , and the election of Donald Trump.

By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.

• Language English
• Publisher Blackstone Publishing
• Publication date December 4, 2018
• Dimensions 5.6 x 1.1 x 5.9 inches
• ISBN-10 198259702X
• ISBN-13 978-1982597023
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

A searing examination of the costs of writing.

Alexander Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art, and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life.

Alexander Chee is one of our most important writers and we should listen to every damn thing he has to say.

A knowing and luminous self-portrait.

An absolute gift of a book for writers everywhere. Every single essay is a pearl.

Chee has written a moving and personal tribute to impermanence, a wise and transgressive meditation on a life lived both because of and in spite of America, a place where, he writes, you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.

Chee remains introspective and self-reflective without arrogance...Chee is able to write about himself and, by extension, about all of us.

Chee's insights about writing, love, and activism are hard won, honest, and incredibly wise.

Chee's marvel of a collection opens with the sting of clarity...The sixteen essays that knit together his profound and resonant collection are a nimble study in radical self-invention...The revelations that follow crackle with the same glowing, essential truths.

Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic.

Every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigor, tact...The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and it uncovers. That's the gift that writing has given Chee, and it's the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers.

He beckons readers to experience his private moments with such clarity and honesty that we're immediately brought into his consciousness. At the same time, he asks us to contemplate the largest questions about identity, sexuality, family, art and war.

His essays are an invitation not to review the rules of writing but to trace a unique pathway into knowledge and being in and through writing.

Meditates on how art shapes who we are, unpacking its author's own coming-of-age as a gay Korean man to craft persuasive, engrossing arguments.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Blackstone Publishing; Unabridged edition (December 4, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 198259702X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982597023
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 1.1 x 5.9 inches

About the author

Alexander chee.

ALEXANDER CHEE won a Whiting Award for his first novel, Edinburgh, and is a recipient of the NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and NPR, among others, and he is a Contributing Editor at The New Republic. He lives in New York City.

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Alexander Chee’s new essay collection is a searing examination of the costs of writing

The author of Queen of the Night and Edinburgh turns to essays in this achingly vulnerable collection.

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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel , a new essay collection by Alexander Chee, is a book that will leave you breathless, as much for its vulnerability as for its exquisite sentences.

Chee is no stranger to the kind of writing that leaves you aching. He’s the author of 2001’s Edinburgh and 2016’s Queen of the Night , and he tends to write the kind of rich, sprawling books that take years and years to put together — hence the decade-and-a-half-long gap between his two novels. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel works on a smaller scale, but it’s no less ambitious or moving.

Its essays cover Chee’s life: his time as a 15-year-old foreign exchange student in Mexico (where “when people looked at me, they saw me, and they didn’t stare at me as if at an object”), his father’s death, his time in college and grad school, his time as a cater waiter working for the Buckleys, his time as a published novelist, and up through the 2016 election (“the election that for now we all speak of only as ‘the election,’ as if there will never be any other”). Much of the book delves into Chee’s struggles as a gay writer of color, but the heart of it comes toward the end, in a string of three essays built around the writing of Edinburgh .

The original plan, Chee writes, was for Edinburgh to be his easy book. He was desperate for cash after graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and throwing together an easy, formulaic book seemed like the way forward. “I’m just going to write a shitty autobiographical first novel just like everyone else,” he decided, “and sell it for thousands and thousands of dollars.”

Instead, he spent five years writing a novel about his own trauma, layered with images borrowed from Japanese mythology and plot structure borrowed from operas. “I set about making up someone like me,” Chee writes, “but not like me.”

Edinburgh is about a boy soprano who is sexually abused by his choir director. And writing it, Chee concludes, “let me practice saying what I remembered out loud until the day I could remember all of it.” It created a space in which Chee could wrestle plainly with what happened to him.

But there’s a certain ambivalence in the catharsis Chee finds in How t o Write a n Autobiographical Novel . In the title essay, Chee warns, “Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times.” Writing Edinburgh meant destroying the version of himself that he presented to the world, to his closest friends and family, and creating a new self, one he’s not entirely sure is any more true than the last one.

And Chee is willing to immerse himself in this ambivalence, to explore fully how writing his autobiographical novel both wounded him and healed him. And what he concludes is that the project of writing holds immense value. “All my life I’ve been told this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter,” Chee says. “And yet I think it does.”

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