How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  “After we graduated, we all moved back to New York,” the editor said. This I especially stored away as important: all these writers from New York heading to the Midwest to study writing, and then returning afterward. I knew Cunningham had punctured what I thought of as the gay glass ceiling, all too visible to me there in that book warehouse. I began to wonder whether his going to Iowa was part of that—and if it was, if it would work for me also.

  Such were the calculations of a young man who didn’t yet know that gay men had been publishing in The New Yorker before him. That it guaranteed nothing. That there was no guarantee except the one possible if you wrote it, and got it in front of at least one other person. Everything was possible then.

  FOR YEARS I HAD mocked the idea of applying to MFA programs, but after that lunch, I became interested in a way I wasn’t prepared to admit. I still made snide remarks about how no one was going to force me to write to a formula. I still said I didn’t want to write fiction that said nothing about the world for knowing nothing about the world (unspoken: like all those MFA students), and so there I was, out in the world—wasn’t that better? I made a point of saying, whenever possible, that I refused to spend two years being made to imitate Raymond Carver.

  This wisecrack about Carver was the supposedly damning critique of the biggest criminal of them all, Iowa. If it sounds familiar, that’s because the formula for making fun of MFA programs, and Iowa in particular, hasn’t changed much in the past twenty years. The fantasy of the haters is of a machine that strips away all originality, of people who enter looking like themselves and emerge like the writerly version of Barbie dolls, plastic and smooth and salable, an army of attractive American minimalists.

  I was writing fiction without my MFA then and getting along fine without it, and I’d just written a story I was pretty sure was my best yet. I was also pretty sure it would never get published, for being a mix of too many strange things, some of them gay. I did not feel like a New York writer, despite being there and writing, and worse, I had to work a lot to afford New York. My bookstore salary was so low I sometimes had to choose between taking the subway and eating. A subway token cost as much as a bagel or a slice of cheese pizza, and so it was always a question of which would win. Some of my friends from college, whom I would see periodically, proceeded with a self-assurance that I didn’t feel into careers that seemed beyond my reach. I told myself I didn’t have the connections they had, to get jobs at The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Grand Street, the various publishing houses—and I didn’t realize that, if I knew them, it meant I had connections too. Wesleyan had been my entrée into this world, but it was a world they had entered eighteen years before, here in New York or somewhere nearby. I was from Maine, the state where they had all gone to camp together, but I had never been to that camp. “You’re not really from there, though, are you?” they used to ask, incredulous, as if I’d told them I cut a canoe out of the woods and rode it down the Connecticut River to college.

  I was only subtly aware of getting an education in social class in those moments, which usually just felt like embarrassment that I had to hide. While I didn’t have their background, what I did have in these social settings were my looks, a sharp eye, a sharper tongue, and a penchant for making a spectacle of myself, which I would then use to observe people’s reactions, learning about them and me at the same time. I could do this and be amusing enough that most people didn’t mind. Also, the schools where all these people who knew each other went to had at least a few people like me around—which is to say, gay, political, and an activist.

  When these connections I didn’t know I had led to an offer of a job as assistant editor at a start-up magazine called Out, I took it. The job was the best way for me to take my mind off of obsessing about whether I would get into an MFA program, because I had, by then, applied.

  MY REASONS FOR APPLYING were not particularly noble. My boyfriend, the man I’d moved to New York for, had also applied. We’d met at a Queer Nation meeting in San Francisco and begun an intense correspondence that turned out to be our way of falling in love. He was a writer also, and I liked the thought of us as two young, talented gay writers going it alone together outside the system. But my talented boyfriend was working temp jobs he hated, and while he made more money than I did, he didn’t feel as talented as I thought he was, and he felt his education had gaps: he’d been a communications major, not an English major like me, and he wanted to know more about novels, poems, and stories. He’d never taken a writing class. He thought a program might help. And so, one night after I finished a shift at the bar beneath his apartment, where I worked to be able to afford to ride the train to my own apartment and still eat, I went upstairs to find him on his bed, covered in MFA brochures.

  “What are these?” I asked. I felt betrayed but didn’t want to say so. I knew what they were.

  He replied defensively—he’d heard me crap all over MFA programs—and our short conversation made me understand how differently we saw ourselves and each other. In his eyes, I had a future without an MFA degree, and he wasn’t sure he did.

  I was afraid this was his way of saying he was leaving me, a sign of some secret dissatisfaction. In the end, I chose three schools to apply to, three schools he had also applied to, based on which schools had produced the most faculty appearing in the brochures—the schools whose students were hired the most after graduation. These were the University of Arizona, the University of Iowa, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

  I applied as a cynic, submitting the story I was sure was my best, the one I was sure wouldn’t be published, sure they would reject me. “If they’re going to have me,” I said, “they need to know what kind of freak I am.” In the story, a young clairvoyant Korean adoptee helps the police find lost children and is the only actually psychic member of an ad hoc coven. He has penetrative sex with his high school boyfriend, who’s also in the coven, and is possessed by a ghost during an informal exorcism ritual. The plan was that a program devoted to the creation of minimalist realism would have to reject me and I could go on my way, my beliefs about everything confirmed. But that’s not what happened.

  My first letter of acceptance, to UMass Amherst, came with an offer of a fellowship and a note from John Edgar Wideman. A day later, I got a phone call at work from a woman whose voice I didn’t recognize. “It’s Connie Brothers, from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,” she said. “A letter is on the way, but I’m calling to offer you a place in the fall class and a fellowship.” She named a sum of money.

  I was stunned.

  “This is great,” I said, remembering to speak, and then blurted out, “UMass Amherst is offering the same amount.”

  “Did you say anything yet?”

  “No,” I said, appalled at my indiscretion.

  “Give me a day,” she said, and hung up. I hadn’t intended to begin a negotiation—I wasn’t aware that negotiation was possible. I was only meaning to be literal: how could I decide between fellowships of equal amounts? I wanted to call back and apologize, but the next day she phoned and offered twice as much, and seemed entirely unconcerned.

  “Thank you,” I said into the phone. “I’ll speak to you soon.” I hung up and announced the news, and my coworkers cheered and shook my hand.

  BEFORE I GAVE NOTICE at Out, I spent a night walking the East Village, thinking about my decision. I ended up at Life Café, an East Village institution, where I splurged and ordered an almond-milk latte and a veggie burrito. I had some copy to edit, an asparagus recipe in fact. I was still not sure I would leave New York. If I moved to Iowa, I thought, I would vanish forever, unrecognizable to myself and others. And the amount of money in the fellowship, even after they’d doubled it—was that really enough to live on? I wasn’t rich here in New York, but if I stayed at the magazine, I knew I could get by. I could afford, for example, this meal I was having. I could make my way up the New York magazine-world ladder, a thought that instantly felt hollow.

&nbs
p; At the next table, a conversation about the new Versace leather skirts broke out, if a conversation is people all saying the same thing to each other. They were so heavy, they kept saying. So heavy.

  I wanted out, I knew then. I wanted cheap rent and a fellowship and people who were talking and thinking about fiction. A time would come again when I would kill to hear people talk about Versace again, but it was not then. Anything you did that was not your writing was not your writing, and New York provided a lot of opportunities to write, but also a lot of opportunities not to write, or to write the wrong things. There were things I wanted, like being a contributing editor instead of an assistant or managing editor, and you didn’t get there by working your way up. Contributing editors swoop down from above, made fabulous by the books they’ve finished, which they didn’t write while chasing after other people’s copy.

  My boyfriend didn’t get accepted to Iowa, which disappointed us both greatly, but him more than me—it was his first-choice school. But he was offered a fellowship by the University of Arizona, which was my first choice, the school where one of my heroes, Joy Williams, taught, and where I’d really envisioned myself, until . . . they rejected me. We’d both been accepted to UMass Amherst, but my boyfriend’s offer was without aid. We drove up to Amherst as we thought about it and had lunch with John Edgar Wideman, who was, well, John Edgar Wideman: a profoundly intelligent, decent man, and a legend. But we knew, by the time we left, what we would do.

  We had been long-distance before, and were prepared to be so again. We each chose our careers over being together, which seemed best for our relationship as well as for our futures. We packed up our little apartments and had a last dinner, where our friends sang “Green Acres” to us over a cake at Mary’s in the West Village, and we made our way onto I-80 West, to drop me off first.

  THAT YEAR, I LIVED alone in an apartment that was once ROTC housing for married officers at the edge of town, up by the graveyard and the Hilltop Bar. This lent the whole project the air of a failed military mission. The floors were linoleum, and a couch, desk, and table were part of the deal.

  The Iowa I found was a gentler place than the one my editor friend had described. Under Frank Conroy, the director when I arrived, the list in the student lounge ranking students from 1 to 50 had disappeared, and with it the fierce feuds the list’s posting engendered.

  Conroy was said to reread the rejected stories first, because he believed that real genius is often rejected at first. This rumor endeared him to me when I eventually heard it, but in those days he was only the legend, sitting in his peculiar way—he could double-cross his legs—in a room full of the incoming class, giving the speech he always gave.

  “Only a few of you will get to publish,” he said. “Maybe two or three.”

  I remember looking around the room and thinking, I bet not. I had no way of knowing, of course, but I was right: of the twenty-five students in my class, over half have published a novel or collection of stories. But the talk was not meant to discourage us. If anything, it was a bravura dare, like a whack on the shoulder the Zen teacher gives to awaken a drowsy meditator.

  I never studied with Conroy, but he taught me one lesson I still remember. I was featured in Interview magazine that year as an emerging poet, and I showed him the page, with my face huge and my poem tiny, almost hidden in my short hair. He smiled, congratulated me, and then said, “You succeed, you celebrate, you stop writing. You don’t succeed, you despair, you stop writing. Just keep writing. Don’t let your success or failure stop you. Just keep writing.”

  BY NOW, I KNEW the Iowa City truck stop was not the town, and that the town was a pretty university town away from the highway, populated with Victorian houses that had been built from plans sent there from San Francisco, the result being that I would experience occasional uncanny moments, passing houses I knew first from that beloved place.

  Not only did no one try to make me write like Ray Carver, no one tried to make me write like anyone. No one even tried to make me write. The only thing I really had to do was figure out whether my ideas were interesting to me, and then, in workshop, I discovered whether those ideas were interesting to other people. I was surprised to learn attendance was, mysteriously, not mandatory. It’s an occasionally controversial part of the Workshop. But the policy acknowledges a deeper truth: if you don’t want to be a writer, no one can make you one. If you need an attendance policy to get you through, then, go—don’t just skip class, go and don’t come back. Writing is too hard for someone to force you into it. You have to want to run for it.

  That year, the Workshop accepted 25 students from a field of 727—now the Workshop regularly receives over 1,100 applications. In the fall of 2001, the numbers leaped upward—as did applications to MFA programs nationwide—and they’ve never really dropped. This fascinates me still, the idea that the September 11 attacks might have spurred people toward the institutional study of fiction.

  The lore around your admission becomes irresistibly interesting once you get in, because it seems the odds are so shockingly against you. You either suspect you do not deserve to be there, or you suspect the others in your class do not deserve to be there. And whatever you think at first, it doesn’t matter; at some point the projection flips. You go from being suspicious of everyone else’s talent to suspicious of your own, or vice versa, until finally you get over it. Or don’t.

  Soon I was walking around town with people I barely knew as if I’d known them forever. The conversations were long and passionate and exhausting, punctuated by strong coffee and the huge, strangely fluffy midwestern bagels. I was reading and writing, and doing a fair amount of drinking, for the alcohol was very cheap, and we were writers in the bars of Iowa City, bars that had been frequented by writers for decades. Something was happening to us all, and it felt as if we were all a part of it, even the ones who wouldn’t speak to each other. It was a little or a lot like a family.

  My first professor for workshop was Deborah Eisenberg. She often dressed in head-to-toe black clothes, familiar from my previous life in New York City, and walked across campus in the impossibly high heels she favored, an ocean of flip-flop-wearing undergraduates around her. She was the kind of woman I had idolized in New York, and finding her here made me feel I’d made the right choice. She was at once a walking memory of the life I’d left behind and a vision of the life I wanted, and I fell head over heels in love with her. I volunteered to drive her home from workshop after the first class, eager to impress her in this puppy dog way I had, and when she asked when I’d started writing, I answered that I’d started late, in college. She laughed a little into the car door as I said this and then straightened up. “I didn’t start until my late thirties,” she said. “I consider that starting young.”

  Driving her became a regular routine for us, one that thrilled me. I forgot my unhappiness about not getting into Arizona and dove into her mind as much as I could, at first through the short stories—her two (now four) collections. I took her seminar also, and read anything she suggested, from Elfriede Jelinek to James Baldwin to Mavis Gallant, and like all of her students, hung on her every word.

  My first workshop with her was a revelation. I’d put up my application story—most of us did at some point in our first year, usually in the first term—still living with the idea that it was the best I had. She saw straight through it, into the way it was a mix of the autobiographical (I really had been in a coven in high school, with my high school boyfriend) and the fantastical (I did not ever help the police find lost children with clairvoyant dreams). I had tried, crudely, to make something out of a Dungeons & Dragons group I’d been in back in high school, but I hadn’t done the work of inventing a narrator who was whole and independent of me. Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how what we don’t, we don’t—and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and t
hat the problem stems from the way we’ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.

  She sometimes sat down at the beginning of class and would look out at us, smile, and say, “I don’t know how you do it. I could never stand it.” Unlike us, she had never attended an MFA program, and had ideas about radicalizing it, like making financial aid a random lottery instead of merit-based, or everyone getting the same amount. In our workshops, she listened carefully to each of us talk about the stories, and then, as a way of closing the discussion, delivered her very deliberate remarks, and it would be as if everyone had been arguing about how to turn the Christmas lights on, while she simply walked up to the problem bulb and fixed it and all the lights would go on. She also gave us some of the best advice I’ve ever heard about how to work with workshop advice. It was, approximately, as follows:

  Listen to your classmates’ comments and try to listen to them in the round. Someone will insist if you just fix X on page 6, all will be better, and someone else will say no, it’s page 13 that needs your attention, and then you will change something on page 10, give it back to them, and they’ll all say, “It’s so much better, that’s exactly what I meant.” The problems are not where they think they are.