How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781328764522
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	145,898
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 16.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

ALEXANDER CHEE is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, and an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, T Magazine, Slate, Vulture, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Table of Contents

The Curse 1

The Querent 17

The Writing Life 41

1989 55

Girl 59

After Peter 74

My Parade 97

Mr. and Mrs. B 120

100 Things About Writing a Novel 135

The Rosary 146

Inheritance 172

Impostor 190

The Autobiography of My Novel 197

The Guardians 221

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel 244

On Becoming an American Writer 251

Acknoledgments 278

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/18/2017
“To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it,” short story writer and novelist Chee (The Queen of the Night) alerts readers here. In the 16 essays assembled, he reflects on a breadth of experiences that, collectively viewed, offer a portrait of the developing writer. In Chee’s hands, varied subjects, however disparate they may seem, coalesce—a summer in Mexico as an exchange student, a stint as a Tarot-deck reader, a writing course with Annie Dillard, an AIDS march, performing in drag, meeting William F. Buckley on a catering job, tending a garden. Chee’s aphoristic pieces “100 Things About Writing a Novel” and “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” implicitly counter the notion of a direct memoir. “The memoir a kind of mask too, but one that insists you are only one person,” Chee asserts. Chee’s collection is, at its core, about writing itself: about how writing happens and writers are formed. A duller, less evocative title along the lines of How I Became a Writer might have been more accurate, but that would have failed to convey Chee’s marvelously oblique style as an essayist—his capacity to inform and educate readers while they’re too enraptured to notice. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Named a Best Book by: TIME, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, The 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,The 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 the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Nonfiction Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction One of Min Jin Lee's Summer Reads in the Washington Post One of Curtis Sittenfeld's Summer Reads in the Guardian A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of 2018 "Alexander Chee is one of the best living writers of today. If he’s not already a household name, he needs to be…powerful, powerful essays with powerful, powerful words…" —Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald, on NBC's TODAY "If writing, too, is a form of drag for Chee, it is also an act of mystic invocation and transference...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...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...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.'" —New York Times Book Review "Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned my sharpened reviewer's pencil in favor of luxuriating in the words. Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic...Chee is a very special artist; his writing is lyrical and accessible, whimsical and sad, often all at the same time. No doubt he is an inspiring writing teacher as well. His views on writing reflect his own, thoughtfully examined life." —NPR  

From the Publisher

★ 2018-01-10
A precise and candid set of essays from the novelist Chee (English and Creative Writing/Dartmouth Coll.; The Queen of the Night, 2016, etc.) about life, writing, and how each sustains the other.This collection wasn't planned as a conventional memoir. However, arranged to cover the author's life from adolescence to the present day, it possesses a loose arc and consistent set of throughlines. One is Chee's status as a gay Amerasian man, which has energized him as a pro-LGBT activist and liberated him as a person; the counterweights, though, are the friends lost to AIDS and the professional doors closed to him. (His first gay-themed novel had a hard time selling due to its subject matter.) Another throughline is Chee's struggle to launch his writing career, and he's engagingly blunt about the labor that serious writing demands and the money that's often lacking anyway. At his most spirited, in "My Parade," he rebuts the dismissive clichés about MFA programs and how they're often born of a writer's fear of confronting the emotional honesty the job requires. "The only things you must have to become a writer," he writes, "are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success." Even Chee's detours don't stray far from his core concerns: working as a cater-waiter for William F. Buckley and his wife demanded emotionally balancing a certain jealousy of their lifestyle and contempt for his homophobia, while tending a rose garden in his dreary Brooklyn apartment serves as a metaphor for the ordered disorder of writing a novel. What truly unifies these pieces, though, is the author's consistent care with words and open-hearted tone; having been through emotional and artistic wars, he's produced a guidebook to help others survive them too.Deserving of a place among other modern classic writers' memoirs like Stephen King's On Writing and Chee's mentor Annie Dillard's The Writing Life.

Kirkus Reviews

Blending memoir with writing instruction, these essays from celebrated novelist Alexander Chee delve into the overlapping layers of experience that shaped his life as an activist, a Korean-American gay man, a survivor of sexual abuse, and, perhaps most importantly, a writer. Taken as a whole, the collection is candid, recursive, and well matched to narrator Daniel K. Isaac’s understated sincerity. From moments of wry humor to shattering honesty, Isaac carries listeners through with sophisticated equanimity, underscoring the sense of intimacy created by Chee’s words. In an essay about his time as an MFA student, Chee declares that his vow as a marginalized author is to “make you care” about his subjects. This audiobook upholds that vow with aplomb. R.A.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2018 - AudioFile