How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

Roxane

Rating: really liked it
Nuanced, sophisticated, intelligent, intimate, sincere essays about writing, identity, and being alive.

Justin Tate

Rating: really liked it
Lest there be any confusion, this is not a book on how to write an autobiographical novel. It is, however, an excellent example of how to write a collection of essays. The book's title comes from a very short essay (5 pages or so) where Chee recounts the challenges of writing a novel that drew heavily from painful experiences. Otherwise, this is a delightfully rendered collage of key moments and reflections from Chee's life. For writer nerds, there are wonderful segments where he describes his time learning from the great Annie Dillard, goes through the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop, and struggles to get his work published.

A major highlight for me were the essays on his activism in San Francisco during the peak of the AIDS crisis. Refreshingly, Chee goes deep into the emotional wells of his life and describe these events with unfiltered honesty.

Like I've seen with other Iowa alumni, there's a good long chunk in here that is a marvel of subject-verb agreement and active voice, but unbearably boring to read. Fortunately this filler moment doesn't go on forever, and we're soon back into the evocative and captivating.

Overall, very impressed. It's not easy to pull off personal essays in a way that reads as profound as they are in your memories. Chee does a great justice to his life by pouring it all out. Even though it's not a How To guide on writing autobiographical fiction, it is a top-shelf reference for writing autobiographical non-fiction.

Thomas

Rating: really liked it
A vulnerable and moving essay collection that kept me up well past midnight thinking about writing, writing, writing. A successful novelist, Alexander Chee shares his personal life in these essays about growing up as both Korean and white, about his work as an activist in the queer community, about his relationship with writing, and more. As a gay Asian American, I related to quite a bit in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel; my own stomach coiled when Chee wrote about one of his first lusts for another boy, and I felt a sense of shared annoyance when he described how his first book faced pressure to be categorized as either a gay book or an Asian American book, as if both identities cannot both exist at once. Chee's writing contains a quiet assuredness with language and self-exploration that I found both comforting and compelling.

I want to dedicate an individual paragraph to the essay "The Guardians," which literally took my breath away. With great courage, compassion, and intelligence, Chee examines his own experience of childhood sexual abuse and his journey to hide from it and confront it. This essay felt like such a masterful and real rendition of how trauma emerges from nowhere and everywhere, how our past affects our relationships with others and our relationship with art and writing, and the time and the bravery it can take to heal. My heart hurt for and felt hopeful for Chee when I read this, as well as for myself and others who have experienced abuse. I wish I could give this essay 10 stars.

A solid collection I would recommend to anyone interested in writing, race, and/or queerness. While at times I wanted a more cohesive theme across essays or sharper insights in a few individual essays, there is no denying Chee's immense talent and effort with writing. He's definitely inspired me - and I am sure many others, especially those with Asian and queer identities - to persevere with writing, for which I am so grateful.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
Conversational, but thoughtful, Alexander Chee earnestly engages with the world in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his memoir about coming of age and becoming a writer. Chee moves at a measured pace in these essays, steadily drifting from subject to subject, scene to scene, memory to memory. He seems less interested in establishing definitive centers for his essays than in exploring a wide range of topics, making his work read as expansive and open minded; a concept groups together each essay’s diverse contents, but in the loosest way possible. The pieces also recall each other, lending the collection a cumulative force. An idea raised in one will be expanded upon in another, a memory referenced early on later fleshed out. Chee’s at his best when he allows himself enough space to delve into the nuances of his material, be it family history or the development of his first novel. Favorite essays included “The Curse,” “Inheritance,” “The Autobiography of My Novel,” and “The Guardians.”

David

Rating: really liked it
This is a nice collection of essays from Alexander Chee. Most of the entries are personal essays, providing a glimpse of the author at different points in his life. The prose sparkles and Chee’s life has certainly been interesting - from his involvement in ACT UP and Queer Nation during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco to Iowa City and New York and beyond.

Julie Ehlers

Rating: really liked it
Things started off really well between Alexander Chee and me. I loved reading about his childhood and family issues, how he decided to go into writing, his early class with Annie Dillard, his experiences with an AIDS activist group after college. The writing was spectacular, intelligent and engaging. But then things got a little iffy: I thought some of his observations about class and about the power of [extremely conventional] female beauty were too simplistic, and I, a long-lapsed Catholic, was not feeling the fascination that Chee, a non-Catholic, had with the Church. But really the problem was me: I should know by now that I can't read an essay collection straight through; eventually all the stopping and starting annoys me, and I take it out on the author. I wisely put the book aside for a while, and when I picked it back up I was once again in Chee's thrall—I truly loved all the pieces on writing and publishing his first novel. The last essay, on whether making art matters when the world is a complete shitstorm, had me in tears by the final page. I was more than moved: I felt unspeakably lucky, to be alive, and to be alive in a world where this book exists. Every author wants to have that effect. Add Alexander Chee to the short list of authors who can achieve it.

Jessica Woodbury

Rating: really liked it
I do not read many books of essays even though I read a lot of essays online. There's a big difference between reading one personal essay and reading over a dozen by the same person, there are not many writers I trust that much. But I do trust Alexander Chee that much and my trust yielded significant dividends with this beautiful, complex, and moving collection.

With an entire book of mostly quite personal essays you may wonder how a person may have this much to say and not just write a memoir. I understand the impulse, but I don't think these stories would be as successful as they are in that format. The essay, like the short story, can zero in on one thing and explore it in relation to many other things. Here, the kinds of things that may get lost in a memoir that is more about things happening get to be examined in great detail. One person, one event, one idea is so much more than a step along the way in a person's life and Chee opens up so many of them here that I feel I've never before encountered so much of one person's self in any one book before. And I've read a lot of memoirs. We are so much more than what happens to us.

I should also add that I am currently writing a semi-autobiographical novel and there are several essays here on writing and specifically on writing something about your own experiences (which Chee did in his first novel, EDINBURGH). While I loved everything in this book, those were the essays that hit me in the gut. There was much highlighting. Not every writer is good at talking about writing, the writing process, and what it feels like. Maybe it's just because of where I am right now and my own investment in my own book, but wow did I finish this book feeling like I had my own mini-MFA on how to move forward with my own terrifying project.

If you have read Chee before, you will encounter the same intelligence, the same deliberate and fascinating prose you have come to expect, and above all the same deep empathy and emotion.

Manuel Betancourt

Rating: really liked it
I don’t think I’ll read a more passionate defense (and excoriation) of the practice of writing. Wrestling with what it means to write and to be a writer, Chee has gifted us with a collection of essays sure to be read and re-read for years to come. As practical advice it delivers. As memoir it dazzles. As both at the same time it astounds.

CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian

Rating: really liked it
This is an amazing, diverse collection of personal essays. Topics range from a teenage summer spent in Mexico, to getting really into tarot, becoming a writer, the HIV / AIDS epidemic, identities of being Korean American and gay, being a student and a teacher, childhood sexual abuse, and lots more. I loved his voice and how he got to the heart of big issues while sometimes writing ostensibly about smaller, everyday things. Excellently read with precision and feeling as an audiobook.

Some favourite passages:

I was someone who didn't know how to find the path he was on. The one under his feet. This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers.

Why am I telling this story? I am, as I've said, a minor character. Out of place in this narrative. But the major characters from the first ten years of the [HIV / AIDS] epidemic have left. The men I wanted to follow into the future are dead. Finding them had made me want to live. And I did. I do. I feel I owe them my survival. The world is not fixed and the healing is still just past my imagining, though perhaps it is closer than it was. For now, the minor characters are left to introduce themselves and take the story forward.

Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

Read By RodKelly

Rating: really liked it
Alexander Chee has totally changed my feeling about essays with this collection. I've not had the best luck connecting with an essay collection from start to finish (besides those of the incredible Thomas Glave and Zadie Smith), but the depth of emotion imbued in Chee's writing sets him a world apart from many other writers who tend to be stronger in one form than in others. No matter the medium or form, Chee is an author who aspires to beauty at all costs, which is quite brave in a world which sentimentalizes beauty as something archaic and passe.

In these rich essays, beauty is at the forefront, but is balanced by a fixation upon the universal human experience of confronting the ugly memories and traumas that consume each one of us. Having read his debut novel, Edinburgh, it was wonderful to read about his process of writing that book, through various essays that stereoscopically explore the journey of its publication. He is a mastermind of pathos and nuance, and can unearth the deepest insights about human nature with just two or three words. There is a calmness on the surface of his gorgeous sentences, but a feverishness flutters, just beyond reach, which compelled me to sink beneath and between the words on the page. I left this collection with a sense that it gave me something I didn't have when I began. Something intangible but recognizable as a thing I didn't realize I needed until I finished reading.

Cheryl

Rating: really liked it
"The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others."

This book of essays, which now includes pink and yellow highlights for easy referencing, has left quite a few indelible impressions:

1. I've made a note to look more closely at stereoscopic narratives... (you'll have to read to understand)

2. After I turned the last page, I ordered Cat's Eye and Edinburgh.

3. I reworked my crumpled plan for that little idea of a small community collective for readers and writers (I created and ran a similar one for entrepreneurs for 7 years).

4. I now understand how memory, as relates to post-trauma, can be explained effectively.

5. I felt encouraged to shut myself in my hotel room after a few days of incessant work travel, ignored the taxing post-reception dinners where I just feel out of place, and simply scribbled away.

6. I went to bed with a smile frozen on my face the next morning.

7. I now see how ethnic and cultural identity crisis, although different, can cause similar pain and that such pain has similar consequences and that worldwide such suffering happens in silence until occasionally, well, occasionally books like these come about and a reader understands that she is not alone.

8. I have now seen Annie Dillard from a unique angle and will smile when I remember "too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus."

9. I love that June Jordan and Joan Didion are also two of Alexander Chee's favorite essayists.

10. I know this with certainty: Activism can be strangely beautiful artistry.

Spencer Orey

Rating: really liked it
I for some reason was expecting a bit more of a writing craft book, but the essays here are fantastic and touching. The collection taken together is a bracing look at the writing life and what it looks like trying to make a career out of writing these days, examined through personal stories. Emotional, thoughtful, and one of those books I can imagine giving to a lot of people.

El

Rating: really liked it
Well, shit.

Look, I put off reading this because there's something about the cover that really pisses me off. Maybe it's the red border. Maybe it's the black-and-white photobooth photo of the author as a young man, the cocky face and tilt of the head. But something about it rubs me the wrong way and I didn't want to admit it might be a good book, especially because I've heard nothing but good things about it.

Dammit, it's a really good book.

This is my first experience with Chee's writing but it won't be my last. Everything he wrote in these essays were things I could either relate to or understand in some way I didn't even expect to. What do I know about being a Korean-American gay man? NOTHING. And yet his writing was so clear and concise that I could understand everything Chee has been through as though I was there with him throughout all of it. That's some mad skill.

I've been talking a lot with my writer-friends about "The Writing Life." Actually, I've not so much been talking with them about it as I have been sending them links to the essay as it was published initially. I've sent it to my MFA mentor and told her she must share it next semester with his class, and I've shared it with the two other women in my class this semester, and two other people who are in the fiction concentration because we get together once or so a week to talk about how our semester is going. (Poorly, it seems, for all three of us.)

While I thoroughly loved all of his essays, this is the one that stands out the most to me. Maybe that has to do with his experience studying under Annie Dillard who is one of the essayists I read when I first moved to Pittsburgh that made me think, hey, I could maybe do that. And here I am. Doing it.

But it's also about what he wrote about writing that has helped me now more than ever. The reminder that what sets Dillard and Chee and others apart from so many is that they do write. It's not just a matter of talking about it - you have to actually do it.

Talent might give you nothing. Without work, talent is only talent - promise, not product.
(p53)

Yeah, we all know this but do we really know this?

As I work on my own manuscript of essays for this MFA, I have struggled with how to write about something in one essay that has been discussed in more detail in another essay. Obviously I don't want to repeat everything I have already said, but certain elements should be shared in case the reader hasn't read the other essay with the pertinent story. Right? So I think about that probably more than I should, like how does one do that seamlessly so it's understandable to a new reader while not becoming stale for a seasoned reader?

I'm not sure if I understand exactly how Chee has done it here, but he did the shit out of that. It was awe-inspiring.

If Chee ever sees this review, I want to adopt him to my new mentor, which isn't a thing that can be done but that's how important I feel his writing is. He showed me through his words what it can be like. I can only imagine what it might be like to have him as an actual teacher, a mentor. In the meantime, I will probably re-read a few of these and really dissect them. Somehow I'll learn his secrets. But until then I'll take his advice and keep writing. It's really the only way.

Dying, what stories would you tell?
(p264)

Teresa

Rating: really liked it
Chee delineates the arc of his life through these essays, affecting and honest and open, with an overall effect that’s hard to achieve. I was most moved by the third-to-last and the final essays, especially their approach to trauma (his own), and how memory and identity and one’s permanent sense of self are affected by childhood abuse.

Lisa

Rating: really liked it
A strong collection of autobiographical essays. These essays fit together so well - Chee writes about his life and about the writing life. Each essay reveals something new. I really enjoyed Chee's style- he writes as if talking to a friend.