How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  I wrote to my friend Rachel Pollack instead. Rachel is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Tarot, the author of seventeen books on the subject, including authoritative texts for the Salvador Dalí and Haindl Tarot decks, and she is the creator of a deck of her own, The Shining Tribe. She’s also a superb fiction writer. Her novel Unquenchable Fire is one I admire a great deal, a satire of magic and suburban America, like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom but with spells for green lawns. I met her as a colleague when I taught at Goddard College’s low-residency MFA program for a year, where we spent weeklong residencies each semester with our students, doing the in-person part of the semester’s work during the day and hunkering down in the Vermont woods together for cafeteria lunches. At those lunches, Rachel spoke elegantly to me about the Tarot as a tool for creative writing—using the Celtic Cross, for example, as a way to think about fictional characters. The questions of the reading—what is leaving the querent’s life, what is about to enter, what is the root of the situation, what is the crown, how do people perceive them, what do they hope and fear?—these are all good things to ask yourself about any character you are writing about. But when she drew cards to help shape a graduation speech she gave, I understood just how differently, how powerfully, she used the Tarot. The speech used the cards as leaping-off points for different thoughts, which she then wove into a sense of the present moment, not the future. She gave the graduating class a collective Tarot reading, essentially. And they gave her a standing ovation.

  What I understood, listening to her, is that the mirror I wanted, back when I wished to see around corners into the future, was never possible. The only mirror to be found in the cards was something that could show me the possibilities of the present, not the certainties of the future. The level of mastery Rachel had of Tarot was of another order entirely. She was an artist and I was a drunk. She could stand and speak through the cards’ symbols in ways that reached past them, bringing out soulful depths and insights into the self and the world, while I had been addicted to the idea I might glimpse the lower truth, a literal one, about what happens next.

  After returning from our second residency together, and finding myself in a particularly long episode of trying to second-guess another of the men at the edge of my life, and whether or not I should move to California, I got rid of my cards and made the decision to move without a reading. I told myself I couldn’t have cards again until I could read in the same spirit as Rachel. If I was going to get a reading for this essay, I wanted Rachel. So I wrote and asked her if she was game for an experiment, and she said yes.

  I PROPOSED TO RACHEL that she read my cards before I finish the essay. She asked if I wanted to draw my own cards or if she should draw them, and I decided I would draw them and send them to her.

  I have a deck again, a gift from a friend, given to me honestly. She and I had gone with a group of friends to a restaurant where the backs of the menus were adorned with various Tarot cards. During dinner, I did a short reading based on the menu card each of us were handed. She was sufficiently impressed with what I managed to tell her that she bought me a deck.

  The deck is the Blake Tarot, illustrated with William Blake’s artwork and redefined by his philosophies. I shuffled and drew three cards, a very simple reading layout sometimes called The Three Fates, with cards for Past, Present, and Future.

  First card: Ten of Science—also known, in a more common deck, as Ten of Swords. Second card: Error, or The Devil. Third card: Stars, or The Star.

  It was a “good” reading for a querent to get, I noted as I looked them over, with the querent rising out of his utter defeat, an ascension. It was also, I noticed, like the conventional narrative of most personal essays: an author struggles with his bondage to something he came to as a result of a defeat in his past, and emerges with a better sense of his present place in the universe. I didn’t let myself think of it as my future, not in any way I could rely on. I thought of it as something to aspire to.

  I sent these results to Rachel. I told her what I asked, for a picture of my relationship to the Tarot, and she wrote back after a few days with this reading:

  Reading for Alexander Chee: His evolving relationship to Tarot

  10 of Science (Defeat)

  15, Error

  17, Stars

  Alex drew these cards as a group rather than with specific questions in mind. And yet, it’s hard not to see them as a progression, with Defeat and Error representing a kind of dead end, or at least a limited direction, and Stars as a kind of spiritual and metaphysical breakthrough that opens up Alex’s perspective to Tarot and maybe larger issues.

  10 of Science

  These cards are from the William Blake Tarot, and Blake saw science as the outgrowth of a mechanistic worldview that he believed was not only wrong but led to misery and oppression. Thus the final numbered card of the suit shows a scene reminiscent of Laocoön and his sons being strangled by serpents for having offended the gods. In an overly dramatic way the card suggests Alex has tried to analyze the Tarot, or study it in a detached way, which can only lead to “Defeat.”

  15, Error

  In most decks this card is called The Devil, and in fact we see a Lucifer-like figure seemingly wrapping up souls in a kind of gluey web. This reinforces the limitations suggested in the first card. The error is somehow in the approach to Tarot, and the attempts perhaps to use it for information or analysis rather than a spiritual guide. The previous card suggests the error is primarily one of thinking, so Alex might ask himself just how he has looked at Tarot in his mind. Remember, however, that “Lucifer” means “Light-Bringer” and he is connected with the Morning Star, Venus, symbol of hope, and suggested in the next card. Card 15 is the light of love trapped in darkness, but with the energy of its own liberation held within it like a seed.

  17, Stars

  The central figure here emerges from darkness into light and a wider vision of the wondrous magical world. With an image as dramatic as the first two cards (this reading, and the Blake Tarot in general, are not trying to be subtle!) the card shows a great breakthrough for Alex in his understanding of the Tarot. The figures trapped in Error might be seen as released into the sky in Stars. Or, Alex’s way of looking at people through the Tarot becomes transformed. The large open book on the table might be the Tarot, its mysteries now open to Alex’s greater consciousness. The original name for card 17, The Star, probably referred to the Morning Star, Venus’s light of love released from the Error of the previous approach.

  Rachel’s reading felt true to me, and as for the third card, that felt true to what I already hoped for.

  THERE ARE TWO KINDS of people, I think: those who want to know the future and those who do not. I’ve never met anyone ambivalent about this. I have been both kinds. For now, I think I know which one is better, but I’m prepared to change my mind again. It may be I am like that drunk who tells himself he can handle his alcohol now. But if I told you I could tell the future, you would laugh at me. And I would laugh at me too.

  In 2006, I had a lesson in knowing the future. My father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Bill, was visiting from Seoul and staying in New York’s Koreatown at the small but decent hotel where he always stayed in New York. I went that night to come out to him and give him my first book. Before this, I had acted as if the entire world could know I was gay except for him, but this meant my career was hidden from him also. I wanted him to know I had succeeded, as a writer and as an openly gay man. I didn’t want him to think I was a failure, and I wanted him to know me as I really was. And as I’d been doing Korean-language publicity in South Korea and America, there was now a remote chance that he might read an article about me. I didn’t want this to be the way he learned about me.

  The conversation went well, given that, historically, Koreans deny that gay people exist. But my uncle was a law professor who’d dedicated his career to international boundary, was a man of the world, the first one I knew who could wear tasseled loafers and l
ook elegant, not silly. And so there we were, in his room, seated on the hotel’s green club chairs, close to saying good night. It was after dinner, I’d given him the book, and we were now discussing the possibilities of my having a family as a gay man.

  “Don’t you want one of these?” he asked, pointing with energy at the photos of my siblings’ kids that I’d passed along to him.

  I explained to him that I could still have a family with another man, could still have a family if I was gay. As if to answer that, Uncle Bill told me this story:

  Before he left for graduate school in the United States, he visited a fortune-teller in Korea. She told him that his younger brother would die young, and he would take his brother’s children as his own, as he would father no children himself. He would either not marry or not stay married, the fortune-teller added.

  Here Uncle Bill paused and looked at me. In his expression was someone braced against his life, betting his whole life against this fortune coming true. I saw him take the call with news of my father’s car accident decades ago, saw him marrying late in life, in his forties, then divorcing.

  After my father’s foretold death twenty-seven years before this night, Uncle Bill, of my father’s entire family, had stayed in touch with us the most, and though it was not frequent—cards at the holidays, a visit every three years—it had meant a great deal to us. What would it be like to look at the phone and think of calling us all those years, afraid even of this, taking his brother’s children as his own, coming true?

  As I hugged him good night, I wanted to stay, to somehow walk him back through the days of his life and remove the fortune’s long shadow, to return him to who he was in the moment before he heard his future, or, to fulfill it all, at the very least to make true that he had become my second father. Of all the things that hadn’t happened, this was maybe the most bitter to consider as I said goodbye. And yet I understood. Here, at least, was a choice to make. A way to feel free, even if that was all you felt.

  ON THE SUBWAY HOME, I remembered the story of my own trip to a fortune-teller as an infant in Seoul. All she would say, apparently, was “This one, he has much to do.” If she said anything else, no one remembers. I think sometimes of asking, but it seems to me now, after my uncle’s story, that you only think you want to know the future, until you do. It would be like waiting for a bullet to pace its way to your side across the years, watching as it approached, knowing when it would hit, and not being able to move away.

  Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is not to know it. Now, when I think of not knowing the future, I think of when, in a yoga class, my teacher had us begin our practice by doing sun salutations with our eyes closed, for as long as we could stand it. “What can you trust of what you can’t see?” he would ask as we moved slowly and then faster, trying not to fall.

  What can you trust of what you can’t see?

  The Writing Life

  1

  Dear Annie Dillard,

  My name is Alexander Chee, and I’m a senior English major. I’ve taken Fiction 1 with Phyllis Rose and Advanced Fiction with Kit Reed, and last summer, I studied with Mary Robison and Toby Olson at the Bennington Writers Workshop. The stories here are from a creative writing thesis I’m currently writing with Professor Bill Stowe as my adviser. But the real reason I’m applying to this class is that whenever I tell people I go to Wesleyan, they ask me if I’ve studied with you, and I’d like to have something better to say than no.

  Thanks for your time and consideration,

  Alexander Chee

  IN 1989, this was the letter I sent with my application to Annie Dillard’s literary nonfiction class at Wesleyan University. I was a last-semester senior, an English major who had failed at being a studio art major and thus became an English major by default.

  As I waited for what I was sure was going to be rejection, I went to the mall to shop for Christmas presents and walked through bookstores full of copies of the Annie Dillard boxed edition—Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, Holy the Firm—and The Best American Essays 1988, edited, yes, by Annie Dillard. I walked around them as if they were her somehow and not her books, and left empty-handed.

  I didn’t buy them because, if she rejected me, they would be unbearable to own.

  After I got into the class, I learned, at the first meeting, that buying her books would have been premature. She told us not to read her work while we were her students.

  I’m going to have a big enough influence on you as it is, she said. You’re going to want to please me just for being your teacher. So I don’t want you trying to imitate me. I don’t want you to write like me. And she paused here. Then she said, I want you to write like you.

  Some people looked guilty when she said this. I felt guilty too. I didn’t know her work. I just knew it had made her famous. I wished I’d had the sense to want to disobey her. I felt shallow, but I was there because my father had always said, Whatever it is you want to do, find the person who does it best, and then see if they will teach you.

  I’d already gone through everyone else at Wesleyan. She was next on my list.

  I CAN STILL HEAR her say it: Put all your deaths, accidents, and diseases up front, at the beginning. Where possible. “Where possible” was often her rejoinder. We were always to keep in mind that it might not be possible to follow rules or guidelines because of what the writing needed.

  The accident at the beginning here is that in the spring of my sophomore year, I fell asleep in the drawing class of the chair of the art department and woke to her firm grip on my shoulder. She was an elegant, imperious woman with dark, short curly hair and a formal but warm manner, known for her paintings of clouds.

  Mr. Chee, she said, tugging me up. I think you should do this at home.

  I felt a wet spot on my cheek and the paper beneath it. I quickly packed my materials and left.

  Before that, she had loved my work and often praised it to the class. Afterward, I could do nothing right. She began marking assignments as missing that she’d already passed back to me, as if she were erasing even the memory of having admired my work. I left them in her mailbox with her clearly written comments, to prove my case, but it didn’t matter: a grade of B-minus from her put me below the average needed for the major. I was shut out.

  I spent the summer before my junior year wondering what to do, which in this case meant becoming a vegan, cycling twenty miles a day, working for my mother as the night manager of a seafood restaurant we owned, and getting my weight down to 145 pounds from 165. I turned into a brown line drawing, eating strawberry Popsicles while I rang up orders of lobsters and fries for tourists. And then, in the last days of August, a school friend who lived in the next town over called me at home.

  Do you have a typewriter? he asked.

  Yes, I said.

  Can I borrow it? he asked. I need to type up this story for Phyllis Rose’s class, to apply. Can I come by and get it this afternoon?

  Sure, I said.

  After I hung up the phone, in the four hours before he arrived, I wrote a story on that typewriter that I can still remember, partly for how it came out, as I now know very few stories do: quickly and with confidence. I was an amnesiac about my accomplishments. In high school, I won a poetry prize from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, and a play of mine was honored by Maine’s gifted and talented program with a reading by actors from the Portland Stage Company. But those felt like accidents, in a life next door to mine. For some reason this first short story satisfied in me the idea that I could write in a way that those other things had not.

  I had made something with some pieces of my life, rearranged into something else, like an exercise from that drawing class that combined three life studies into a single fictional tableau. The story was about a boy who spends the summer riding a bicycle (me). He gets hit by a car and goes into a coma, where he dreams constantly of his accident until he wakes (this happened to my dad, but also, the fateful art class). When the boy wakes,
he is visited by a priest who wants to make sure he doesn’t lose his faith (me with my pastor, after my father’s death).

  The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.

  All I could tell in that moment was that I had finally made an impression on myself. And whatever it was that I did when I was writing a story, I wanted to do it again.

  My friend arrived. I closed the typewriter case and handed it over. I didn’t tell him what I’d done. Somehow I couldn’t tell anyone I was doing this. Instead, I went to the post office after he left, a little guilty, like I was doing something illicit, and submitted the story.

  I saw your name on the list, my friend said weeks later, back at Wesleyan, with something like hurt in his voice. Congratulations.

  When I looked, I saw he wasn’t on the list. It felt like I’d taken something essential out of the typewriter before I gave it to him, and wanted to apologize.

  I didn’t think I’d gotten in because of what I’d written.

  I went on to get an A in that class, which I didn’t understand, not even when a classmate announced he’d gotten a B. I didn’t understand because it didn’t feel as if I knew what I was doing. I did apply and get into Kit Reed’s advanced fiction class for the next semester—twenty pages of fiction every other week—and won from her another of those mysterious A’s. I next applied for and was accepted at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I studied with Mary Robison and Toby Olson and met Jane Smiley’s editor at Knopf, Bobbie Bristol, who offered to read a story of mine and then returned it with a note that said if I could turn it into a novella, she’d buy it.