How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  This taught me a valuable lesson. It is a rookie workshop mistake to go home and address everything your readers brought up directly, and if there is a problem inherent to workshop, it is that some people credulously do that. A reader experiencing what they called a pacing problem could be experiencing an information problem—lacking information that would make sense of the story for them about the character, the place, the situation—and problems with plot are almost always problems that begin in the choice of point of view. I learned to use a class’s comments as a way to sound the draft’s depths, and as a result had a much better experience of the workshop overall.

  One common complaint about workshops is that the people who take them end up in some way alike, and that the class enforces this alikeness on one another’s writing in the workshop. But that was never what I experienced. Instead, I think of a great line from one of Deborah’s short stories: “You meet people in your family you’d never run into otherwise.” It’s true of families, and true of workshops also: you meet people there you’d never otherwise meet, much less show your work to, and you listen to them talk about your story or your novel. These are not your ideal readers per se, but they are ideal in that you can never choose your readers in life, and this is a good way to get used to it. Listening to their critiques forces you past the limits of your imagination, and for this reason, also past the limits of your sympathies, and in doing so it takes you past the limits of what you can reach for in your work on your own. Fiction writers’ work is limited by their sense of reality, and workshop after workshop blew that open for me, through the way these conversations exposed me to other people’s realities.

  I will never forget the classmate who said to me in workshop, about one of my stories, “Why should I care about the lives of these bitchy queens?” It angered me, but I asked myself whether or not I had failed my characters if my story hadn’t made them matter to someone disinclined to like or listen to them—someone like him. A vow formed in my mind that day as I listened to him, which has lasted my whole career: I will make you care.

  If his reaction sounds too harsh, well, the criticism you receive in your workshop is as nice as it is going to get in your writing career. I never tolerated abuse, racism, or homophobia in workshop back then, and I was in Connie Brothers’s office so often that first year, she offered to place the entire Workshop in sensitivity training. I turned this offer down. It seemed to me the more reactionary people in the program would make me the target, instead of their own racism or homophobia. I decided to focus on confronting what I found, as I found it, regularly.

  I now think of an MFA as taking twenty years of wondering whether or not your work can reach people and spending two years finding out. It is not an escape from the real world, to my mind, but a confrontation with it, even if it also felt, in my case, like a fantasy in which it was my good fortune to study with Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Margot Livesey, Elizabeth Benedict, and Denis Johnson, as well as Deborah Eisenberg. I had left a job, and a man who loved me, whom I loved, to be there. That’s as real as anything.

  The man and I broke up finally in 1994, the year I finished at Iowa. He’d applied to the Workshop again during our first year apart, and when he was rejected a second time, it ate at him, and he resented me. When he canceled our plans to spend the summer together, saying, “You’re going to be the famous one, the one everyone remembers,” I tried to give him room for his disappointment, but it felt like he was punishing me. He’s since had a lot of success as a writer, so in that sense he was wrong. I think disappointment, and the desire to revenge oneself on that disappointment, can be an enormous motivator. Being rejected from an MFA program can push you as much as getting in can.

  THE FIRST THING MY MFA meant to me, when I finished, was that I seemed to have become unfit for other work, though this proved to be an illusion.

  I was fit for writing and for teaching. That I knew. I also knew the only teaching job I wanted was the sort you could get if you had published a book. As I was newly single, and as New York seemed like a good place to be single and gay and a young writer, I moved back, the words of that editor—After we graduated, we all moved back to New York—echoing as I did so.

  That first summer, I went on interviews for jobs in publishing, but everyone who interviewed me, on seeing that I’d just come from Iowa, assured me I didn’t want to work there. “Writers shouldn’t hear the way publishers talk about them,” one publishing friend said by way of advice. “Also, the pay is crap.” I’ve since known several successful writers who had publishing careers, but it takes a canniness that I couldn’t fake, to go into publishing and act as if I had no interest in being an author.

  I ended up being a waiter—first a cater-waiter, and then I waited tables at a midtown steakhouse. Deborah Eisenberg had been a waitress, I told myself when the possibility came up, and I remembered the story she often told of her time as a waitress, and I even let it be something of a guide. Joseph Papp, of New York’s Public Theater, approached her to commission a play and was surprised to find her reluctant to leave her job. She didn’t want to lose valuable shifts. He asked her what she made on those shifts, and that was partly how the price of the commission was set.

  I could live that way, I told myself. And sure enough, a few months after taking my first waiting job, I set plates down between an editor and a newly hired editorial assistant and overheard the figure quoted as they discussed a promotion, almost half of my annual income. I was waiter rich, as we called it then, and I stayed at that job for four years while writing my first book.

  During those years of waiting tables, I was not above bragging about having gone to Iowa in moments of insecurity, but I always reproached myself afterward. The white shirt, black bow tie, and apron came to feel like a cocoon for the novel, or the writer, or both. I wrote that novel on the subway, going back and forth to the restaurant, and sometimes I wrote it while at work—I still have a guest check with an outline that came to me while I waited for my section to be seated.

  The year after that novel was published, I was invited to teach at Wesleyan. I congratulated myself on a completed plan on that first day of classes. I know some people condescend to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it. Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

  IT’S A STRANGE THING to teach at your alma mater. I have done it twice, at Wesleyan and at the University of Iowa. You learn that students and faculty are kinds of insiders at such places, but within realms that keep each hidden from the other. When you teach as an alum, then, gossip soon illuminates the old myths—the gossip that only the faculty has combines in your head with the gossip only the students had when you were a student, and your own students add to that.

  At Iowa I learned to talk about Raymond Carver, because he so often comes up if I mention Iowa. He is part of the lore, but not, as everyone seems to imagine him, as the so-called high priest of minimalism. That is not—was not—him. He was not especially celebrated for his writing while he was a student at the Workshop, we learned as students there. And his famous minimalism grew out of his relationship with the editor Gordon Lish—a very New York sort of story, not at all a midwestern one. The extent to which Lish cut himself into Carver’s work is a source of jokes now, a punch line. I am more concerned with what I see as Carver’s real legacy, as a professor: Carver was known for being drunk much of the time, at least in the stories I’ve heard. His generation of writing professors—most of them literary writers given jobs because of their published work alone—resulted in the reputation that all writers are like this! That has followed all writers now in academia.

  The boom in the MFA, whatever you might think of it, didn’t come about because young writers wanted to imitate Carver’s work, a
s is sometimes alleged. It came about because too many of them imitated Carver’s life, and administrators of writing programs began to demand some sort of proof that the writer hired to teach have the skill and the will to teach, to be a colleague, and to participate in the work of the department. You can sniff all you like that a book is the only credential that matters, but chances are you haven’t met a provost. In the aftermath of these unaccredited greats, the rest of us are now required to present our degrees.

  With this, ironically, comes the complaint that even our sins are on the decline, that more and more we are too well behaved, domesticated creatures writing domesticated fiction, and the MFA is also blamed for this situation, created by, well, writers who don’t have MFAs.

  It may be that you, like many, think writing fiction does not require study. And not only that: that it is not improved by study. That talent is preeminent, the only thing required to become a writer. I was told I was talented. I don’t know that it did much except make me lazy when I should have worked harder. I know many talented people who never became writers, perhaps because they got lazy when they were told they were talented. Telling writers this may even be a way to take them out of the game. I know untalented people who did become writers, and who write exceptionally well. You can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and learn to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, if you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer. PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

  “I AM TAKING THIS PARADE down the middle of the road,” I wrote in a letter to a friend from San Francisco soon after arriving at Iowa. I had the sense of being given a place inside an American tradition, and I decided I would make the best of it. I would queer it.

  A favorite photo from my time as a student in Iowa is of me at a Halloween party, dressed in short shorts, fishnets, a black motorcycle jacket, a yard-long blond wig on my head, applying lipstick in front of a bull’s-eye, studiously not looking at the camera, aware that it was on me. I was eventually crowned the Queen of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Prom, an event that saw me appear at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in that same wig, wearing a red leather coatdress slit up the sides, makeup, and heels. I remember the hush as I stepped into the bar area where the veterans sat, the saloon doors swinging, to go to the restroom, and the pause as I realized I had to decide which one to use.

  I am still, I think, that prom queen, caught in the doorway.

  Going to Iowa was one of the best things I ever did for my writing life. If the myth about the Workshop was that it tried to make us all the same, my experience was that it encouraged me to be a writer like no other before me. Whether I did that was up to me. I applied because I was afraid of losing something I lost anyway, and I went because I got in. I hoped to find some protection from oblivion, from my own shortcomings, from the culture’s relentless attack on the stories of people like me. I don’t know if I’ve found that, or if I ever will. I still fear those things. I still face them. And for now, I’m still here.

  Mr. and Mrs. B

  HOW COULD YOU? my friends would ask when I told them. How could you work for someone like him? Do you ever want to just pick up a knife and stab him in the neck? Poison his food?

  You would be a hero, one friend said.

  I did not want to stab him, and I did not want to poison him. From our first meeting, it was clear, he was in decline. And as for How could I, well, like many people, I needed the money.

  And besides, he didn’t really matter. I loved her.

  BEFORE I WORKED AS a waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley, I knew them the way most people did: from Page Six of the New York Post and its editorial page; from Vogue, the New York Times, and the back pages of Interview. When I first moved to New York, in 1991, Pat Buckley was the preeminent socialite if you were looking in from the outside—and I was.

  Like many ambitious young New Yorkers, I had ridiculous fantasies that involved how one day I would run into Pat Buckley in the rooms I saw only in those pictures. Reading the Times on the train on my way to work, I imagined walking into the dimly lit salons where the rich and powerful met and determined the fate of the culture, if not the world.

  When I say I really didn’t think of William F. Buckley, I mean I didn’t read what was referred to by her friends at their parties as “his magazine,” the National Review, though I sometimes read part or all of his column in the Post. I tried to read him when I did because I thought of him as the opposition, and I wanted to know what the opposition said and thought, or I thought I did, but too often it was too awful, too enraging, to finish. I knew civilized people were supposed to read the ideas of people who disagreed with them and at least think about them. In this way I was not so civilized.

  When I met him finally, he was not as vigorous as she was, perhaps from drink or cigars or both, though she certainly drank and smoked as well. He was shorter and more rumpled, as if one day he had gotten tired and then never quite rested enough. She was very tall, tanned, and animated, with a wild shock of carefully highlighted hair. She wore a painterly face of makeup that at times resembled the portrait of her that hung in their home. She had the habit of filling the room, and then you might notice him somewhere in it, holding court in a quieter way. It was easy to imagine the woman she’d once been, handsome though not manly, a natural leader. And for those of us who worked in their house, it was her we watched, always. For it would be her we answered to if anything went wrong.

  IN 1997, WHEN I began working for the Buckleys, I was the picture of a New York cater-waiter: five foot ten, 165 pounds, twenty-nine years old, clean-cut. I liked cater-waiting because I looked good in a tuxedo and couldn’t stand the idea of office work unless it was writing a novel. It was the easiest solution to my money problems when I returned to New York after getting my MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Cater-waiting paid $25 an hour plus tips and involved working everything from the enormous galas in the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center to People magazine lunches to openings at the Guggenheim Museum. The tuxedo and the starched white shirt—and the fact that each assignment was at a different, often exclusive place—made me feel a little like James Bond. Sometimes my fellow waiters and I called it the Gay Peace Corps for how we would go to these places, clean them up, make them fabulous, throw a party, and leave. And I liked that when I went home, I didn’t think about the work at all.

  As part of my writer’s education, being a cater-waiter allowed me access to the interiors of people’s lives in a way that was different from every other relationship I might have had. When you’re a waiter, clients usually treat you like human furniture. The result is that you see them in unguarded moments—and that I liked. There was the Christmas buffet dinner where the host and hostess served their visiting family wines given to them by various friends that they considered unworthy of being cellared. Or the Christmas party where the host took a friend into the coatroom to beat him in private (so badly he had to leave), to punish him for being a jerk to us, the waiters. Afterward the host handed out his friend’s cigars to us and said, “My friend said to say he was sorry.” There was the party on the Upper East Side where we changed into our tuxes in a spare apartment we jokingly called Daddy’s Rumpus Room: the walls were padded with gray flannel and the windows frosted so that no one could see in or take a photo of whatever it was our host did in there. And then there was the Upper East Side party for some wealthy closeted gays and lesbians who, to hide their sexuality and protect their fortunes, had paired off and married so they resembled straight couples. They looked on with a placid mix of despair and happiness at their sons and daughters, many of them openly gay and lesbian, who were there with their same-sex lovers.

  The best thing I’d done for myself as a waiter was to have the cheap polyester tux we all had to wear tailored shor
tly after starting. I soon caught the eye of a private-client captain, who eventually brought me to the Buckleys. He was a funny, boyish, older gay man whose expression could change from a warm smile to an icy stare in less than a heartbeat. He had an English face and complexion, with a last name that didn’t match. I interviewed with him and left, certain I’d failed. If he liked you, he never let on right away.

  He worked for some of the wealthiest clients in New York City. I recall helping Martha Stewart pick out a favorite petit four in the home of the entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman while the fashion designers Vera Wang and Tommy Hilfiger looked on. I learned, as I washed up after the party, that the plates had cost $3,000 a setting. “Don’t drop them,” the captain said. “They’re worth more than you.” I became used to climbing, at high speed, the back stairs at prominent homes up and down Fifth and Park Avenues, and washing plates and glasses that cost more than my yearly rent.

  The moment I describe next was not at the beginning any different from any of those other jobs, but I remember it because of a word: maisonette. It started with a phone message on my answering machine: “Come to ____ Park Avenue. It’s a maisonette. Don’t go to the front, come around the side. But don’t ring the bell. I’ll be in front and take you in the service entrance. Tuxedo, plain shirt, bow tie. I want a fresh shirt—no stains on the cuffs or collars. And be sure to shine your shoes, as she’ll know.”

  And then, after a pause: “When I say she’ll know, I’m talking Pat Buckley. You’re working at the Buckleys’. Look your best.”

  I KNEW WILLIAM F. Buckley in the same way that every gay man of my generation knew him: as an enemy. On March 18, 1986, the New York Times published an op-ed column by him that advocated for the tattooing of people with AIDS on their buttocks and wrists. He initially proposed something more visible, but then rejected it as an invasion of privacy.