How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  What will you let yourself know? What will you allow yourself to know?

  2

  THE IDEA OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL fiction had always rankled me. Whenever I told stories about my family to friends, they always told me to write about my family, and I hated the suggestion so much that I didn’t write about families at all.

  Even so, most of what I wrote then, if not all of it, was in some way autobiographical. My central characters were typically a cipher to me—like me but not me, with one-syllable names. Jack Cho, for example, the recurring character in four of my first published stories, all a part of that rejected experimental novel. Jack was a Korean American gay man from San Francisco, the only son of a single mother, who moves to New York for love and becomes involved in ACT UP. His relationship to me was more than accidental, but not so close that I couldn’t delineate his experiences from my own. Even the name, Cho, was like Chee—a name that was Chinese and also Korean. I invented Jack to help me think through my relationship to activism and sex. Other stories I wrote at the time were investigations of various friendships, relationships, and breakups. I was, meanwhile, struggling with a different existential issue from the ones my writing peers from more normative backgrounds simply didn’t have to address. Kit Reed, my undergraduate fiction teacher, first identified it. She had told me that if I was fast enough, I might be the first Korean American novelist. She wasn’t entirely right: Younghill Kang was, in fact, that person, but he was, until recently, lost to contemporary literary history. And when Chang Rae Lee published Native Speaker, in 1995, she said, “Well, you’ll be the first gay one.” And she would be right.

  None of this was inherently interesting to me, however, at age twenty, and felt strange, uncomfortable, to aspire to. I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing that the person I would become already existed—some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My long-standing love for the singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this was that I didn’t feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity—any identity, really—was unreliable precisely because it was self-made.

  When people told me to write about my family, it felt like I was being told that my imagination wasn’t good enough. But also that I could only write one kind of person, a double standard in which as a fiction writer I was supposed to invent characters from whole cloth and tattoo my biography onto each of them. I think every writer with a noncanonical background, or even a canonical one, faces this at some point. I was fighting with this idea, in any case, when I pulled out a binder I had promised myself I would look at once I got to New York.

  I HAD CREATED THE binder a few months earlier, in the spring, as I was going through my papers, deciding what to save and what to throw away when I left Iowa. I discovered some pieces of writing that initially seemed to have no common denominator. There was a short story, written in college; several unpublished poems, whose blank verse felt a little too blank, more lyrical prose than prose poem; a fragment of an unfinished novel, with a scene in which a young man kills himself by setting himself on fire; and a fragment of an unfinished autobiographical essay about the lighthouses in my hometown at night. I put them all in a binder and said, out loud, “When we get to New York, tell me what you are.”

  I think I knew all along the process of writing a novel was less straightforward than it seemed. But thus far, it hadn’t seemed straightforward at all. Perhaps out of a desire not to appear prescriptive, at no point in my education as a writer had my teachers offered specific instruction on the writing of novels and stories. We read novels and stories copiously, argued about what they were constantly, but plot was disdained if it was ever discussed, and in general I went through the MFA feeling as though I had to learn everything via context clues, as if I had wandered into a place where everyone already knew what I did not know, and I had to catch up without letting on.

  The one conversation I can remember having about the conception of a novel had come indirectly, several years earlier. In college, when I was at work on my first collection of short stories for a senior creative writing thesis, I had the good fortune to be classmates with the writer Adina Hoffman, who read my collection and delivered this news: “I think that these all want to be a novel,” she said. “I think you want to write a novel.”

  Hoffman’s idea that day challenged me at first—I had been trying very hard to write stories and I felt as if I had failed. The connections between the stories seemed at best remote to me. But over time I understood: she saw the way each of them had roots that connected to one another, and also the way I’d formed a narrative in my ordering of them. Even the enjambments between sections gave the reader the pause you feel as you understand a story is about to unfold. And when it didn’t go further, it felt like a mistake. This vision of my own process, and the way it has informed what I do, and even how I teach, continues to this day. That day when I asked my fragments to tell me what they were when we arrived in New York, before I got into my loaded car and drove there, I knew I was calling out to a novel. I knew these pieces had their own desire to be whole. And as I opened the binder, that summer in New York, and read through the fragments again, I could sense the shadow of something in the links possible between them, and began to write to the shape of it.

  THE FIRST PLOT I came up with was drawn right from that summer. The drama of my mother’s bankruptcy seemed, at the time, a good place to start: a young man returns home to help his mother move out of their family home. She’s been forced into bankruptcy after being betrayed by a business partner, and the son finds her lost in depression and grief—still grieving her husband, his father, who had died eight years earlier. The son plots his revenge on the lawyer he sees as responsible for his mother’s current troubles, hoping at least to find a measure of justice, and then a lightning strike burns the lawyer’s house to the ground.

  The main character was, of course, another cipher for me.

  At 135 pages, I sent it to my agent, who said, “It’s beautifully written. But it’s a little hokey, in the sense that no one is going to believe this many bad things happened to one person.”

  I laughed. I had often found my own life implausible.

  “Still, it really picks up after page ninety,” she said. “Keep going.”

  WHEN I LOOK AT that first manuscript, I can see again how the plot was, well, not a plot—it was only a list of things that had happened. I also saw what she saw change on page 90. After the narrator visits his father’s grave, the novel moves into the past, and into the present tense.

  This is how I remember the summer of being twelve to thirteen: fog-horn nights, days on bicycles at beaches, lunches of sandwiches and soda. My mother works to get recycling made mandatory, sends me off into parking lots with hands full of bottle-bill bumper stickers as she does the grocery shopping. My hair is long and wavy and I am vain about the blond highlights at my temples that my father admires. Summer in Maine starts with the black flies and mosquitoes rising out of the marshes to fill the woods, and they drive the deer mad enough to run in the roads. The tan French-Canadians arrive in cars, wear bikinis, eat lobsters, glitter in their gold jewelry and sun-tan oils. The New Yorkers bewilder and are bewildered, a little cranky. The Massachusetts contingent lords around, arrogant, bemused. They are all we have, these visitors. The fisheries industry is dying, the shoe manufacturing industry, the potato farms, all are dying. Our fish are gone, our shoes are too expensive, the potatoes, not big enough. The shallow-water lobster was made extinct the year I was born, quietly dropped into a pot, and now we serve the deep-water brothers and sisters. The bay no longer freezes in winter and dolphins have not visited us in decades. In a few years, cut-ba
cks will close our naval-yards. Soon a dough-nut shop will be a nervous place to be. We can only serve the visitors and make sure everything is peaceful and attractive as we sell them our homes, the furnishings inside them, the food we couldn’t think of eating.

  A space break, and then:

  The sun is hours from setting. I am sun-burned, tired, covered in sand. I go into the bathroom, lock the door and lay down on the floor. On my back the cool tiles count themselves. I pull down my trunks, kick them across the floor to the door. The only light a faint stream coming in under the door, a silver gleam. I look into it and wait for time to pass.

  I’d moved into the present tense as I had the idea of making the novel into something like Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood, a novel I loved, told in alternating points of view from the same person at different times in her life. An artist goes home for a retrospective of her work, and memories of the scalding love of her best friend from childhood return and overwhelm her. The novel uses past tense for the sections in the present, and present tense for the sections in the past, and between the two, the reader senses what the girl experienced that the adult does not remember.

  I was interested in this idea of the self brought to a confrontation with the past through the structure of the narration. I found that writing in the present tense acted as self-hypnosis. Discussions of the use of the tense speak often of the effect on the reader, but the effect on the writer is just as important. Using it casts a powerful spell on the writer’s own mind. And it is a commonly used spell. The present is the verb tense of the casual story told in person, to a friend—So I’m at the park, and I see this woman I almost recognize . . .—a gesture many of us use. It is also the tense victims of trauma use to describe their own assaults.

  The pages previous to this, in the past tense, shed a little light on what my agent meant by “no one will believe this many bad things happened to one person.” The draft included my father’s car accident and subsequent coma, and the suicidal rage he emerged with, and which returned in storms until his eventual death; my father’s family’s various betrayals of us, ranging from stealing bank statements for my father’s business to suing for custody of me and my siblings to accusing my mother of infidelity while she was caring for my father; and my own suicidal feelings, and sexual abuse, which I hadn’t told anyone about, because I feared becoming even more of a pariah than I already was just for being mixed. And while it had never felt like love or community, it had almost felt like not being alone.

  These autobiographical events were not organized in any way. When I was helping my mother move, I’d noticed she had not moved in; she had just left everything where the movers had dropped it. I’d had the sense of being in the presence of a metaphor, and I was: my novel draft was like that. Page 90 was where my narrator’s attention turned inward, when he looked away from the crisis in his mother’s life to see his own.

  I cut those first ninety pages and continued with the remaining forty-five, using them as the new beginning. These pages took up the problem of my narrator’s silence and his urge to self-destruct, and I saw it as if for the first time.

  The college story in the fragments binder had been my first attempt to write about my abuse: a story about a boy in a boys’ choir who cannot speak about what is happening to him, and thus can’t warn away the other boys, and so the director continues his crimes until he is arrested, and the boy blames himself for the role his silence played in the ongoing disaster. The boy wants to kill himself once the crimes are revealed—ashamed of his silence more than anything else—and is prevented by the accidental intervention of a friend, a victim also, one of the boys he was unable to protect. This, I understood, was where that story belonged. I had written my way there. And as I continued on, this would happen again and again: I would pause, find a place to insert a section from the binder, and continue.

  3

  IN AN INTERVIEW DEBORAH Eisenberg gave to the Iowa Review, she describes learning from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala that it is possible to write a kind of fake autobiography, and that idea—as I understood it—guided me next. I needed to make a “fake autobiography,” for someone like me but not me, giving him the situations of my life but not the events. He would be a little more unhinged, a little less afraid, a little more angry. These inventions were also ethical and gave everyone else involved in the real events some necessary distance. To begin imagining the memories that drew my narrator into his past, I found I kept thinking of what that boy was looking into, in the light under the crack in the door.

  There’s a quote in my journals from June 4, 1998, four years into the writing of the novel: “These stories are gothics, and have in common a myth of a kind where the end result is the same paralysis.” I don’t remember who said this to me. There is no attribution and no context. I think I must have thought I would always remember the speaker—my hubris, and as such, a common omission in my journals. But it succinctly describes so many of my early attempts at fiction, even what I thought of as my life, and what I was reading. And the primary challenge I faced next with the novel.

  The boy needed a plot. I wanted to write a novel that would take a reader by the collar and run. And yet I was drawn to writing stories in which nothing happened.

  My stories and early novel starts were often criticized for their lack of plot. I was imitating the plotless fiction of the 1980s, but also, it seems, lost in a landscape where I was unthinkingly reenacting the traumas of my youth. All of my stories lacked action or ended in inaction because that was what my imagination had always done to protect me from my own life, the child’s mistaken belief that if he stays still and silent, he cannot be seen, and this was wrong. And yet I had believed it, without quite knowing I believed it. In light of this insight, I knew I needed a new imagination. I needed to imagine action.

  The plots I liked best worked through melodrama, the story’s heart worn on the sleeve before being bloodied up: rings of power, swords, curses, spells, monsters and ghosts, coincidence and Fate. These were safe to the person I had been, as all of them were imaginary and impossible problems with imaginary and impossible solutions. They consoled, but they were not choices, emotions, and consequences based on choices, people exchanging the information they needed to live their lives. Finding a magic ring of power that would allow me to face an enemy who had won all our fights before was not the same as mastering myself for the same fight. And these stories did not often require that the hero change. The plotless, literary fiction of the eighties and the blockbuster science-fiction novels I’d read and loved until now both had in common that they had consoled me and thrilled me, but they didn’t inherently offer me a way to understand how to write this novel. I needed to learn how plot and causality could be expressed in story—not one I read, but one I wrote. Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis, or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.

  I examined my favorite myths and operas, searching for plots I loved, with explicit action, drama, and catharsis. Tosca, for example, where everyone conceals a motive in their actions, and at the end everyone is dead. Or the myth of Myrrha, in which a daughter, in love with her father, poses as his concubine, becomes pregnant, and is turned into a myrrh tree. She gives birth and tree nymphs hear the crying child, cut him loose, and care for him, raising him as their own. The tree weeps myrrh forever after. Forbidden desire, acted upon, resulting in transformation, paralysis, and then catharsis. I needed to learn how to make something like this, but not this exactly. I needed to hack a myth, so it could provide some other result. To use the structures of myth to make something that was not a myth, but could be. I wanted this novel to be about this thing no one wanted to think about, but to write it in such a way that no one would be able to put the book down, and in a way that would give it authority, and perhaps even longevity.

  Plots like these contained events so shocking or implausible that the reader sympathized with the emotions instead, the recognizable humanity there: loss, forbidden lov
e, treachery. No one has ever said they couldn’t empathize with Hera for her jealousy at Zeus taking lovers just because they themselves had never lived on Mount Olympus. As I remembered the way victims were met with condescension, disgust, and scorn, I knew if I told our story, or something like it, I had to construct a machine that would move readers along, anticipating and defeating their possible objections by taking them by another route—one that would surprise them. They would want to grasp for something familiar amid it all. Plot could do this.

  Plot was also a way of facing what I couldn’t or wouldn’t remember. The gothic story that led the character—and the writer—into paralysis, that left me paralyzed and unable to write. Annie Dillard, in my nonfiction class at Wesleyan, had warned us that writing about the past was like submerging yourself in a diving bell: you took yourself down to the bottom of your own sea. You could get the bends. You had to take care not to let the past self take over, the child with the child’s injuries, the child’s perceptions. “All of us were picked on, growing up,” she said. “Come up before that happens.” I knew that my situation was different, but also the same. I would need a way to descend and return safely. Turning myself into a character, inventing a plot, turning that past into fiction, I hoped, could solve for all of this.

  4

  AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION REQUIRES AS much research as any other kind of fiction, in my experience. I bought books about sexual abuse, the predatory patterns of pedophiles, and a self-help book for survivors, which I needed more than I knew. I bought a book about the flora and fauna of Maine in every season. I took out my old sheet music from the choir. Whether or not I could trust my memory, I was also writing across gaps, things I wouldn’t let myself remember. While I had no choice except to invent my way forward, I relied on material that contained the facts I needed.