How To Write An Autobiographical Novel

Essays

Alexander Chee

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781328764416
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form 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 his first collection of nonfiction, he's 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. Named a Best Book by: Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, Paris Review, Mother Jones, The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction * Recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees' Award *
Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography

On Becoming an American Writer

1

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I thought the world would end?

This was the question that appeared in my head the morning after the election, the election that for now we all speak of only as “the election,” as if there will never be any other. The question appeared like a black balloon determined to follow me around, bobbing in and out of my vision, a response to my first thought: This is the end of the world.

I was standing in my kitchen, at the stove. I was supposed to teach a class that morning. Canceling the class seemed out of the question, though I did not know how to do all of the things that would get me there. The coffee seemed impossible to make, as did breakfast. Going downstairs, getting into the car, driving the twenty minutes south to the college where I teach. Walking into the classroom. I couldn’t imagine any of that.

What I did imagine: a white supremacist, evangelical Christian, theocratic, militaristic government. My Muslim friends rounded up and deported. Being hunted by right-wing militias for being gay, or for being mixed race, or both. Climate departure, the next step after climate change, when the weather turns in violent shifts, monsoons and blizzards, floods and freezing. The ocean a hot soup, empty of life. A government opposed to environmental protections, labor protections, abortion, birth control, and equal access to health care.

I was, I knew, in shock. The previous night, when the results seemed final, my partner of three years had proposed marriage, and I had accepted. We decided to marry before the laws could be changed, and I knew it would help if we ever needed to seek asylum. Before this, my now husband had expressed a deep antipathy to even the idea of marriage. My sister called afterward, distraught, having just been able to put her children to bed—they had begged her to move, to leave the country. That had all happened between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m.

My phone was in my hand. A tingling and numbness ran from the top of my left shoulder all the way down to where my phone digs into my palm, pushing on a nerve there when I scrolled with one hand, as I did, walking from room to room in disbelief and horror. This is what I was doing just before I came to a stop in the kitchen. The pain that began that day lasted almost a year.

I checked Facebook, an autonomic response. WHAT WILL YOU TEACH, my friend the poet Solmaz Sharif had posted.

What will I teach? What do I know? This somehow brought me out of my trance. But I was still motionless in front of my stove.

Can you make coffee? I asked myself. No. Can you buy a coffee? Yes. Go buy a coffee, I told myself.

I put on a coat. I got my coffee and a breakfast sandwich and drove south to the school. The views along Interstate 91, of the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, usually console me, but that day all I could think about on that drive was the death of the world.

---

I ARRIVED IN THE college’s town to find it as empty as if classes were canceled. As I walked to my office, a young woman left the library and crossed the strangely empty lawn. As she drew closer, I saw tears streaming down her face. She did not look at me.

In my office, as I collected the materials for class, I overheard another young woman crying as she described her anger to a colleague about the future in a country that had elected a sexual predator as president.

What will you teach?

It felt as if a president had been assassinated, but the president was alive. Instead, the country we thought we would be living in was dead. As if a president had assassinated a country.

I walked into my classroom. My students were all present. The room was very quiet, and tense, as if they were trying to find a way to tell me one of them had died. Many of them were crying or had just stopped crying. I hadn’t been sure if any of them would be celebrating the new president before this, but now it was clear none of them were.

“I’m not going to pretend last night didn’t happen,” I said. “Let’s just talk about whatever it is we need to talk about.”

“What is the point,” one of my most talented students asked after the shortest pause. “What is the point even of writing, if this can happen?”

---

THE DAY THE UNITED States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, preparing to teach the next day. In the art professor’s apartment I was subletting, I watched the news of the invasion on his antique television, the screen the size of a paperback book. I was surrounded by art as a segment aired declaring that the museums and antiquities of the ancient Persian culture preceding Saddam Hussein would likely be destroyed by American shelling. A country’s historic legacy lost, perhaps forever. To these concerns, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was shown, responding to this. He offered, “What’s a few less old pots?”

He was chipper, even affable, as he said it. He thought he was funny. Yes, who wants them? Who wants any of it? A strange chill dropped over me, the sort of shadow felt even in the night. How cheerful he was as he consigned these parts of one of the world’s oldest cultures, the source of so much of our art, literature, and science, to rubble. I turned off the television and sat alone and angry in the cold apartment, a pile of manuscripts to mark next to me.

What was the point? The task of being a writer suddenly felt inadequate. As did I. That next morning at Wesleyan, I faced something entirely new in my teaching career: I didn’t know what to say to my students. And I very much wanted to know.

2

MY GENERATION OF WRITERS—and yours, if you are reading this—lives in the shadow of Auden’s famous attack on the relevance of writing to life, when he wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” I had heard the remark repeated so often and for so long I finally went looking for its source, to try to understand what it was he really meant by it. Because I knew it was time for me to really argue with it. If not for myself, for my students.

Auden wrote this line in an elegy for Yeats. And Yeats, it should be said, was a hero of Auden’s. To read the whole poem is to know he meant, if not the opposite of what this line is so often used to say, something at least more subtle: an ironic complaint. This isn’t even the sharpest line Auden wrote on the subject. But somehow, the line handed anyone who cared a weapon to gut the confidence of over fifty years’ worth of writers in the West. As we faced the inexorable creep of William F. Buckley’s intellectual conservatism that used anti-intellectualism as its arrowhead, this attitude, that writing is powerless, is one that affects you even if you have never read that poem, much less the quote. Pundits, reviewers, and critics spit it out repeatedly, as often now as ever, hazing anyone who might imagine anything to the contrary. I don’t blame Auden or Yeats, who had both hoped to inspire political change with their poetry earlier in their lives. His poem meant to express his disillusionment. I don’t think Auden meant it as a call to stop trying. But America was a young enough country, American literature was young also. It was easier to believe that we were wrong than to believe what writers around the world believe: that we matter, and that it is our duty, to matter.

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STUDENTS OFTEN ASK ME whether I think they can be a writer. I tell them I don’t know. Because it depends, first and foremost, on whether you want to be one. This question is not as simple to answer as it seems. The difficulties are many, even if you truly want to be a writer. What seems to separate those who write from those who don’t is being able to stand it.

“I started with writers more talented than me,” Annie Dillard had said in the class I took from her in college. “And they’re not writing anymore. I am.” I remember, as a student, thinking, Why wouldn’t you do the work? What could possibly stop you?

I began teaching writers in the fall of 1996, at a continuing education program based on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I called it the MASH unit of creative writing, because you can’t turn anyone away from your classes there. The program pays instructors what it has always paid them, even now, twenty years later, and they do so because there is always an MFA graduate like me who needs a first teaching job, and every other place that offers writing classes in New York is more or less like this. But I loved my students, and what I still value of this experience is that it was there that I first discovered that good writing was, as Annie had said to us, very teachable. Talent mattered less than it was made to seem to matter. I watched in my first classes as I applied techniques I’d been taught to students who seemed at first to be unlikely writers and they turned into excellent ones. I learned a different kind of humility there in the face of their efforts, which I think still serves me as a teacher: you don’t know who will make it and who will not, and students’ previous work may or may not be an indicator of what they can do, good or bad.

Most of what Annie had taught me was about habits of mind and habits of work. As long as these continued, I imagined, so would the writing. I will always want my students to know that if what you write matters enough, it makes no difference where you write it, or if you have a desk, or if you have quiet, and so on. If the essay or novel or poem wants to be written, it will speak to you while the conductor is calling out the streets. The question is, will you listen? And listen regularly?

Teaching these classes I also learned what could stop a writer. So many of the students in my classes were stuck. Some were struggling with a story they both wanted to tell and had forbidden themselves from telling. Some were struggling with a family story that they believed, if told, would destroy their family, or them, or their relationship to the family. A close friend to this day will not write the novel he wants to write about his late mother, who was closeted until he came out to her, and she then came out to him. He is afraid of the reaction of a single cousin.

Why does the talented student of writing stop? It is usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure, and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve feared you are. You can imagine the story you might tell, or you can imagine this other story—both will be extraordinarily detailed, but only one will be something you can publish. The other will freeze you in place, in a private theater of pain that seats one. These writers were—are, in many cases—people who know how to write. What they don’t know is how to become unstuck. How to leave that theater they made for themselves, how to stop telling themselves the story that freezes them.

I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write, but how to keep writing. How to face up to who you think is listening. Is the person listening more important than you? Or is the story you would tell more important than you? I was teaching how to stand up and leave that room in your mind so you can go and write—and live. But the question after that, always, is, Live with what?

And one answer was always going to be America.

---

WHEN I WAS A student of writing in college, I was guilty of believing that I would have the sort of life of an author that proceeded along lines that kept me well within the limits of the middle class. It is the American art trap: make art but be a good member of your social class. A friend of mine even has a belief that I think is worth testing—that the primary deciding factor of whether a writer becomes a writer is their relationship to being middle class. If they are working class or upper class, or even an aristocrat, they are at least comfortable betraying that class in order to write.

Put another way: Will you be able to write and also eat, or even eat well? Will you have to work another job? Will you be able to pay for health care, a house, dental work, retirement?

These fantasies frayed and fell apart fast enough as the two places I chose to focus my career—writing and teaching—have both met with extraordinary income destruction in the last two decades. I learned quickly that if you stop writing, nothing happens, but I also learned that I had nowhere else to go. I mastered my diligence in the face of that, but I am still not free of the demon that can stop me in my tracks and make me doubt my sense of my own worth and power. And there isn’t just a single demon, nor are they only personal ones at that. You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world—and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. And that to do otherwise is to fail art, the country, and yourself. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become.

---

I READ THE FIRST review of my first novel on the Thursday after September 11, 2001, in the empty computer center of a dormitory at the girls’ school in Maryland where my sister worked. My brother and I had left the city together. He lived seven blocks from Ground Zero, and I, with my history of asthma, found that for the first time in decades, I was unable to breathe easily even out in Brooklyn, where I lived, as long as the site continued to burn. So we left for a week to take a break from the air. We were very naïve to think the fire would be out by then. I will always remember the cloud of smoke, as long as the island of Manhattan, visible from the Verrazano Bridge.

As I read the review—a rave, the sort of review you hope for as a debut author—I had the sense of being a character in a science-fiction film, one in which the writer, who finally sees his novel published, then watches as the world ends.

We did return to New York eventually. The world did not end. Instead, all through that fall, people said things to me like, It’s too bad your book isn’t about the war, and I said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say. I taught my writing classes at the New School, where I was teaching then, and each time I passed through Union Square station, I consulted the thousands of flyers for missing persons, in case one of them was someone I knew. I thought of how my own flyer might read, with the details people who knew me would decide might be helpful if you had to find me, and you might find only an arm, or the body but no head. For one terrible moment, I resolved to acquire more distinguishing characteristics in case this happened to me, though I discarded the idea as a mania driven by fear. I boarded empty flights to the two readings my publisher could afford to send me to, and ate the extra meals the nervous flight attendants offered. I went and spoke on the radio, answering questions about my book that was not about the war, and met readers, and more reviews appeared.

There were news reports of an epidemic of writer’s block in New York City, and after those appeared there were reports of writer’s block in many other parts of the world too. Writers known and unknown spoke of how they couldn’t think of writing anything that approached the scale of the attacks. As if this were the task.

I didn’t know anyone who was lost that day. When I think of the lost, I think mostly of a man I heard speaking on the radio on the morning of the attacks. He had called the station from inside the first tower to describe what was happening. The host quickly thanked him for calling in and then said, in a bit of a panic, Why are you on the phone with me? Why aren’t you on your way down?

You don’t understand, the man said. The whole center of the building is gone. I can’t go down. That’s why I’m calling.

I don’t know how to describe the feeling I had in the silence that followed, except that it was approximately the length it would take you to read this sentence aloud.

What do you mean the whole center’s gone? the host asked, the panic in his voice no longer slight.

I mean, I can see down the center of the building, he said. The stairs are just . . . gone.

Then the line went dead, and the radio host was weeping, asking us all to pray for the missing caller.

Later we would know for sure the towers had fallen. In that instant, I did not know, though I felt certain. It was unbearable. I turned off the radio. I was in my apartment, about to make coffee for myself, but found I had none. The enormity of what had happened was not yet clear, but I decided if the world was going to end that day, I was going to need coffee to face it. I left to get some at the corner café where I knew a couple of my friends would be working. I could get coffee and be less alone. In the hallway, I saw people leaving the building as if it were an ordinary day. They did not know what had happened. I didn’t know how to tell them. I blurted it out.

They looked at me as if I were insane. As if their disbelief could make it not true.

At the café, I found my friends had scalded themselves with spilled coffee when the first news of the attacks came on the radio, and so I helped them do what they needed to do to close the store, and then, as we prepared to leave, I noticed, outside the window, what seemed to be faint grayish snow was beginning to fall out of the sky.

Is it snowing? one of my frien...