How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  I also bought a weathered copy of Aristotle’s Poetics at a library sale. I don’t know for sure when I purchased it. All I know is that at some point, in deciding to address this need for story, for plot, and catharsis, I turned to Aristotle. The book is remarkable for many reasons, including the pleasure to be found in reading Aristotle on tragedy, as if it has just been invented, speaking confidently about how no one knows the origins of comedy, but that probably it is from Sicily. He notes that the root of “drama” is the Greek verb dran, which means “to do” or “to act,” and this became one of the most powerful insights for me. Memorable action is always more important to a story—action can even operate the way rhyme and meter do, as a mnemonic device. You remember a story for what people did.

  Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind—grand, and complete in itself, presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting, through pity and fear, the purification of such emotions.

  Here the text is footnoted:

  purification: the Greek word katharsis, which occurs only here in the Poetics, is not defined by Aristotle and its meaning is much controverted.

  Pity and fear and grand action. And purification. This was what I was after. I had reached for the right instructions.

  Reading Aristotle to learn how to structure a novel means reading at an angle, almost at cross purposes, but I understood him all the same. And rereading him now, I still thrill to his descriptions of beginning, middle, and end, or his casual mention, in the section on scale, of “an animal a thousand miles long—the impossibility of taking it all in at a single glance,” and understanding that, while he was speaking of scale in the story, this was, in a sense, what a novel was: a thought so long it could not be perceived all at once. His assured way of saying that a story “built around a single person is not, as some people think, thereby unified” gave me an understanding of both, and what it meant with regard to his description of the way Homer “constructed the Odyssey, and the Iliad, too, around a single action”—of the grand kind—was for me like watching lightning. A single grand action unifies a story more than a single person, the characters memorable for the parts they play inside it. Or it did, at least, for the novel I was writing. And that is the thing that is harder to describe. Each of these lessons meant something specific to me as I constructed the novel, and were not necessarily useful to anyone else.

  Also of great use to me was the very simple explanation of “something happening after certain events and something happening because of them.” I think of this as a chain of consequences, made from the mix of free will and fate that only one’s own moral character creates. But his description of poetry versus history struck me as precisely the difference between fiction and autobiography. Or at least, fiction and life.

  From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s job is not relating what actually happened, but rather the kind of thing that would happen—that is to say, what is possible in terms of probability and necessity. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of using verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen.

  For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements.

  This was where my biggest problem lay. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen. Recounting the way in which these terrible things had happened to me did not lead the reader to the sense of a grand act of the kind Aristotle speaks of. A simple recounting did not convince. The plot I needed would have to work in this other way, out of a sense of what would happen to someone like me in this situation, not what did happen or had happened to me. The story of my mother’s bankruptcy, for example, even if it felt like one of the great tragedies of my life, would not pass muster with Aristotle as something that would arouse the audience to pity and fear in the way that finds purification. As a story, it was only the account of good people undone by misfortune. And any poetic truth to it belonged to my mother, to share or not share as she preferred.

  I chose one of my favorite operas, Lucia di Lammermoor, based on the novel The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott, as a model for my plot. A young man seduces and then betrays the daughter of the man who destroyed his father, as an act of revenge, but he unleashes a terrible murder beyond his control. I decided I would queer it: instead of the daughter, there would be a son. And instead of a marriage, the doomed love of a student for a teacher.

  The choir director character in my draft thus far had a son, age two at the time of his arrest and trial, and this was the clear Aristotelian tragic line to draw: sixteen years later, he is the spitting image of the best friend my narrator had been unable to protect, his father mostly unknown to him for having been in prison. The narrator meets him when he takes a job at his school, falls in love with him, and is seduced, unknowingly, by the son of the man who molested him as a child, these many years later. Only after they fall in love do they discover the truth about each other.

  I set about making up someone like me but not me. I brought the father back to life and restored the mother. The grandparents I had never known well because they lived in Korea I moved into the narrator’s family home, to live with him.

  I turned my attention to my main character’s family in greater detail, through the plot’s other parent: the myth of the kitsune, the shape-changing Japanese fox demon. When I read in the lore that red hair was considered a possible sign of fox ancestry, I recalled the single red hair my father used to pull out of his head and the benign stories he made up for me at bedtime about foxes, and went looking for a more ancient fox ancestor. I found the story of Lady Tammamo, a medieval Japanese fox demon who had come to Japan from China. According to legend, she escaped her pursuers by leaping from a rock that split from the simple force of her standing on it, just before she vanished into the air. When I looked up where the rock was—said to emit murderous gases until exorcised of her ghost—I saw she could fly in a straight line to the island off the coast of Korea my father’s family came from. I could continue Lady Tammamo’s story, braiding her, fantastically, into the ancestry of my autobiographical narrator.

  The foxes in these kitsune stories were said to be able to take the shapes of both men and women, but the stories were only ever about foxes as women. I queered the myth much the way I had the opera, making a fox story about a fox taking the shape of a boy. I decided to give my cipher a life like mine but not mine, one in which he was always made to feel uncanny, and then made that feeling literal: he suspected himself to be part fox, a little alien in the way that makes you entirely alien. A complex tragedy, then, as Aristotle calls it—with two characters, my cipher and the director’s son, no single narrator, reversals and discoveries, “fearsome and pitiable events,” my plot born of a Japanese legend, hidden and in exile in Korea, and a Scottish novel turned into an Italian opera. The original reason for the title Edinburgh was no longer in the manuscript—I had discarded my plan to send the main character, Fee, to the University of Edinburgh—but I kept it because it made sense to me for new reasons that had nothing to do with my life, a symbol of this novel’s eventual separate life.

  I made a world I knew, not the world I knew, and began again there.

  5

  SOMETIMES THE WRITER WRITES one novel, then another, then another, and the first one he sells is the first one the public sees—but mostly, the debut novel is almost never the first novel the writer wrote. There’s a private idea of the writer, known to the writer and whoever rejected him previously, and a public one, visible only in publication. Each book is something of a mask of the troubles that went into it and so is the writer’s visible career.

  Edinb
urgh was almost that for me. I finished a draft in 1999 and applied for the Michener-Copernicus Prize, a postgraduate award of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. That’s twenty dollars I’ve wasted, I remember thinking as I mailed the application. I’d applied before with unfinished excerpts of the same novel; this was the first time I sent the entire thing. Frank Conroy called my agent a few months later to tell her I would be getting the prize. She then called me and left the most thrilling voice mail of my life. I remember listening to it in a phone booth on the corner of Third Avenue and East Fourteenth Street. Conroy had picked up the novel in the morning and read it all day until the end, when he decided to give it the prize. He called my agent, alerting her in advance of the official announcement, and told her he would do all he could to help sell the novel. It seemed like publication was close.

  Instead, the submission process would go on for two years, and the book would be rejected twenty-four times. Editors didn’t seem to know if it should be sold as a gay novel or an Asian American novel. There was no coming-out story in it, and while the main character was the son of an immigrant, immigration played no part in the story. “It’s a novel,” I said when the agent asked me what kind of novel it was. “I wrote a novel.”

  The agent eventually asked me to withdraw the manuscript from submission.

  The days of imagining that I could write a “shitty autobiographical first novel just like everyone else” and sell it for a great deal of money were five years behind me. The award, when I received it, came with a monthly stipend for one year that allowed me to work less and write more. It was meant to help a writer during what was typically the first year of work on a novel, since debut authors often receive small advances. The grant was more than twice the advance eventually offered by the independent press that picked it up, when, after refusing to withdraw the novel from submission, I left my first agent and found the publisher on my own. With a Korean American editor from Maine, Chuck Kim. It was a coincidence out of a novel—my novel, actually.

  It’s the story of my life, Chuck said when we spoke of it.

  I really hope not, I said, hoping he had a happier life than this one, the Greek tragedy I had made myself.

  You’re my Mishima, he said, once I agreed to the contract.

  I really hope not, I said, wishing to have a happier future than the Japanese writer and suicide Yukio Mishima.

  I was the first living author for this house, the now-bankrupt Welcome Rain, which I called “Two Guys in a Basement on Twenty-Sixth Street.” Chuck and his boss. They were smart, ambitious men who made their business publishing books, mostly in translation, mostly by dead authors. Chuck frequently had me to his house for dinner with his wife and brother, and we would speak of Korea and Maine equally. I had based my main character, Fee, a little on someone I knew in childhood, a young woman who would always try to kill herself, and fail every time, and who turned out to be a friend of Chuck’s as well.

  I feel as if you’re on a mission with this novel, and I don’t think it’s in your best interest to complete it, my first agent had said when she had tried to get me to let it go. No one will want to review this, given how dark the material is, and they won’t want to tour you with it, she said. One editor had rejected the novel with a note saying, “I’m not ready for this.” I don’t want to say the entire problem was the whiteness of publishing at the time, but it was not lost on me that the first editor to try to sign it up was Asian American also: Hanya Yanagihara, who then worked at Riverhead Books. She had ultimately agreed to submit it for the Pushcart Prize, which allowed editors to nominate works they had tried and failed to acquire. I was preparing my manuscript for this when I met Chuck.

  With Chuck behind the novel, everything changed. His enthusiasm for it was peerless. He got it in front of scouts, in front of editors at The New Yorker, and he hired a freelance publicist to pitch it to newspapers and magazines. Eventually the paperback rights went up for auction and eleven of the houses that had turned it down for hardcover asked to see it again. One editor even sent a note: “I feel as if we let something precious slip through our fingers.” The winner, Picador, had in fact turned it down for hardcover.

  But the result that mattered most came when I received a postcard from a friend of mine, the writer Noel Alumit, who also works as a bookseller. He had enthusiastically pressed the novel on a friend, who sent it to a prisoner he was corresponding with, a man serving time for pedophilia: he’d been convicted of having a relationship with a teenage boy. The card, written by the prisoner to the friend, described how he read the novel in four days and didn’t speak the entire time. People thought he was ill. “This is the only thing that ever told me how what I did was wrong,” he wrote.

  I still didn’t know I had written it to do this, but then I did.

  I wish I could show you the roomful of people who’ve told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be.

  I still don’t know if I’d be in that room.

  The Guardians

  1

  IN 2004, A MEMORY returned to me after twenty-five years. And with the memory’s return, I understood that I had lived for a long time in a sort of intricate disguise.

  It was not so different, on reflection, from making an autobiographical character.

  This version of me was living the life of a thirty-something writer in New York City, as if in a play. I had an apartment on the nineteenth floor of a building at Sixteenth Street and Third Avenue, a one-bedroom with a balcony and views across the top of the city in three directions. The many landmarks were outlined at night by their lit windows, as if in klieg lights, and I liked to stand with a scotch and a cigarette looking north on Third Avenue and imagine that I had made it. This was only a sublet, and I would be there for only six months, but it made me feel like either Batman or Bruce Wayne, depending on whether it was day or night. I had spent so much time in New York without a view, I looked at it almost as if I were hungry and this was a feast. I was there with these thoughts from Sunday to Wednesday, and then, every Thursday night, I left on a train for Middletown, Connecticut, where I taught at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, as their visiting writer.

  At Wesleyan, I rented a room in the apartment of an art professor who was never there when I was, and so it was like having an entire second apartment for the weekend, another fantasy I indulged. I often stayed over on Friday night, after my class, and Saturday too, before returning to Manhattan. The apartment was on the second floor of an old house on a corner of the campus, done up a little like a summer home, barely winterized, and painted dove gray. A darker, nubbly, Spartan gray carpet covered the floors, dressed up by kilims, and the ceilings and floors were warped and thus changed height from room to room, disorienting as I walked the apartment. I sometimes banged my head on a doorframe. My bed there was an antique with a flat, hard mattress, covered by an old quilt, and the books in every room, on every shelf, were what I thought of as the wrong books by the right writers, the books that had disappointed, and they haunted me as I began my second novel.

  Each week was a movement from New York to Connecticut and back again, from light and air in Manhattan to darkness and enclosure in Middletown, and I took to calling myself a Connecticut Persephone. This was a joke, of course, as only occasionally did I feel as if I were descending into the underworld upon returning to Wesleyan. I had a crew of student writers, smart, ambitious, funny students who reminded me of myself at their age and the friends I’d had then. Many of my former teachers were now my colleagues in the English Department, along with a few younger faculty members who quickly became friends. But every so often I would turn a corner in the night and feel as if I had wandered across the years into my own past.

  I was teaching stereoscopic narratives to my writing students that fall: the same story told from two or more points of view. I had used one in my first novel, but I employed the structure of Batman comics as my example, as I did not want to be the kind of professor who tau
ght his own book. Batman stories offered basic and effective versions of this dual narrative. There is a mysterious crime, then Batman’s attempt to apprehend the criminal. Typically the criminal, at one point or another, captures Batman and tells him the entire story from his own point of view, and the crime is made knowable, the criminal also. During the monologue, Batman manages to escape and bring the criminal to justice, explaining his methods, and the reader then has the complete story.

  This was also how I felt about being back at Wesleyan. I was faculty now, had been a student before. I was inside my own story, looking at myself as I once was through the eyes of the professor I had become. I was also seeing what my teachers likely had seen of me when I was their student.

  I thought this story of my education was the only story to see this way. I was wrong. It was just the beginning of the stories I would see this way.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, I had a regular visitor to my apartment who was like my own strange secret—a relationship so oddly closeted, it was as if it wasn’t happening at all. He was a young writer who had set out, in his awkward way, to seduce me, after reading my first novel when he was my student. I had made him wait until he graduated before we even had a conversation about his feelings, much less mine. I wanted us to meet again, away from the circumstances of the class, and to see if the attraction was the same. I was sure it wouldn’t be. That I would just be an ordinary older man, and not his teacher.