How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  This was something I had never, ever wanted. I had always disdained it for what may seem the obvious reasons, but also, my whole dating life until then had been directed toward men my own age or older. My type was someone in his thirties or forties, even when I was in my twenties. When the professor I’d rented my apartment from at Wesleyan had warned me against sleeping with students, I found the whole thing so ridiculous, I held the phone away from my mouth so he wouldn’t hear me laugh. But if he hadn’t heard me, perhaps the gods had instead.

  I could tell you that he was different from the other students, but it would sound like the same excuse offered by the few professors I knew who had crossed this line, the ones I had only contempt for. I was also hoping to be relieved of what I felt for him. The state of things between us was at least not a simple case of attraction. He was talented, and I had even consulted him for his thoughts on my new novel draft. I had what I knew was a crush, and feared I was in love with him, despite knowing that there was likely little to no hope in the matter. He was not entirely out of the closet at the time, and as my sense of how out he was kept changing, this was just one of the reasons I was cautious. He would invite me to join his group of friends, for example, at social events with all of them out in Williamsburg, but they were not aware of his sexuality, and I could see they were often confused as to why he had invited his thirty-something former writing teacher to hang out with them.

  It is hard to be with someone in the closet, because you are never sure which version of the person you are with—the one who is hidden or the one trying to be free. Despite his being closeted, after we left his friends he would turn passionate and kiss me, often on the subway platform while we waited for the L train to take me back to the city. I kept thinking he would draw back, but he was at his most amorous in public, which confused me.

  I loved him, in part, for what he might be someday, which is never a good way to love someone. It was in fact a way of rejecting him, a way of rejecting who he is now, and I think in some way we both knew this.

  One night in the middle of the fall, he was at my apartment having drinks with me and some friends of mine. After the friends left, I kissed him on the balcony, and he seemed less inhibited, more passionate, and then his eyes flared, and he began gathering his things, nearly running.

  What is it? I asked.

  I have to go, he said. I need to leave.

  But why? I said, and leaned in and kissed him goodbye. He kissed me again and drew back, his eyes still wild.

  I have to go, he said. I’m afraid of me and I’m afraid of you.

  We didn’t speak for several days. They were some of the loneliest days. I knew what he was trying to do, though. I had put together his seemingly disparate stories, not included here, and I had seen this expression on his face from the other side—this had happened to me when I was his age.

  It takes one to know one.

  He was trying to face what he wanted, and it was also what scared him away. His desire for men brought back memories and sensations he didn’t want, pushed down so far he was sure they were gone, until suddenly, there they were again. He eventually tried to tell me all of this. And I can’t say any of what he told me, or what I guessed, because it belongs to him and not to me, and his journey in that regard is his own. I just knew then that I had become the man I ran from when I was having my own flashbacks. And so I was patient as he fought whatever this was inside him, even as I knew how my own relationships then had ended. I was in yet another stereoscopic narrative.

  He could be as old as I am now when he is at last ready to tell anyone about it all. He might also never get there. Based on my own experiences with flashbacks, I developed a theory that he could only kiss me in public places, because it made him feel safe to know he could leave if he needed to. But I didn’t like it, and I didn’t understand why until the night we were in the bar where we’d first kissed, in Brooklyn, a place we always kissed, in fact, and he leaned in and kissed me again. I remember that people were watching. That night, it made me strangely angry to be watched. And then for the first time in over twenty years the reason why it made me angry came to me, and the memory I am speaking of returned.

  Watching him have his flashbacks, I had imagined I was done with mine. I was wrong. Now I was the one who had to make excuses, all these years later, and leave.

  In Sleeping Beauty, the handsome prince makes his way through a forest of thorns and kisses the princess as she sleeps, awakening not just her but the entire kingdom. The barren wilderness is transformed into a paradise. This is not quite what happened here. I can say one kiss put me under a spell. Another kiss woke me. And I was full of horror to see the devastation around me.

  2

  WE ARE NOT WHAT we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea.

  There were moments before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape, independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me. Every now and then, I could see the distance between us. Three times, in particular, this other self had appeared before me.

  IN 1993, THE FILM Sex Is . . . , an independent documentary about gay men and their sex lives, debuted at the March on Washington. As one of the interview subjects, I was invited to attend. I went and watched in horror as I described the sexual abuse I’d experienced in the boys’ choir I’d once been in, declaring it an education, even a liberation, and that it hadn’t harmed me at all. The film sped along to another interviewee. I said more things later, but could see, in the dark of the theater, only my huge, lying mouth.

  At the time I filmed the interview, my first relationship with a man who loved me, and whom I also loved, was falling apart because of my PTSD related to what I was describing. Worst of all was the smile I had on my face on-screen as I said this lie, a smug sort of superiority that I hated.

  The film went on to win Best Gay Film at the Berlin Film Festival and had a national, and then international, theatrical release. By the time I moved to New York in 1994, I was regularly being recognized for my role in it. I remember taking part in New York City’s Gay Pride celebration that year, in Greenwich Village, walking against the crowd, searching for my friends, when I noticed two teenage boys coming toward me arm in arm. One lit up in recognition of me and his arm shot out. “You’re the guy from the film,” he said.

  I paused, terrified, but also curious. Yes, I said. I asked where they were from.

  “Saskatchewan,” they said, and then wished me a Happy Pride, and were on their way.

  I have to fix this, I remember thinking. Wishing for a solution as big as the mistake, or as big as me.

  IN OCTOBER 2001, I had my phone in my hand, about to call my mother. My first novel, Edinburgh, was about to appear in bookstores the very next day. The story is of the legacy sexual abuse leaves in the life of a young man angry at himself about it, and his apparent powerlessness over that silence. She’d complained that she hadn’t seen the novel in manuscript, and I had pacified her by assuring her I wanted her to have the bound book. This was partly true. I was proud to finally be able to hand my mother the physical thing, to say, Here. I’m a writer. But now the bound book was in my hand, and I was preparing to send it to her, and I stopped, pulled up short by the memory that I had never told her what had happened to me.

  The scope of this gap terrified me. How had I let this happen? I was thirty-four years old. I was about to publish a novel about sexual abuse based on my own experiences, but had never told her one thing about them. Not only that, but in all the time that had passed between when the events had occurred and that moment right then, I could see I had been very angry at her. A child’s anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting
her instead to guess my thoughts. That adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it.

  Even at that moment, I was trying to stop myself. I was frozen in the act. I wanted to put the phone down and never tell her. I tried to imagine if there was even one way I could continue to pretend with her. But I knew she would be deeply hurt to be surprised by what was in the book. I could see how I passed myself off to others as someone who had gotten over it all on my own, the disguise I had put on of being unhurt simply a way for me to fix myself in private. I had never told her because I had hoped I could heal in secret and she would never have to know. And yet here I was, still in pain.

  As I prepared to call and tell her, I did so knowing it had taken me eighteen years to tell her. Almost as long as it had taken me to tell myself.

  And then I made the call.

  IN THE SPRING OF the same year as the memory’s return, I was working as a writing tutor to a graduate student in nonfiction who felt I understood her better than her teachers did. She sent me a draft of her memoir, and as I read through scenes describing how she had attempted suicide and then, in therapy afterward, raged at her therapist for not knowing she had attempted suicide, I wondered at the therapist’s reaction to the suicide attempt itself. I sent her what I thought was an ordinary email: “I don’t see that you’ve included scenes describing what it was like telling your therapist about your suicide attempt, or how she reacted. If you could describe this, it would help the reader know why you’re so angry here.”

  I received an email back, the letters in the tiniest possible font, smaller than she normally used, such that I thought, at first, it was some strange mistake, or even a hacking.

  I never told her. I’ve never been in therapy for it, either.

  My immediate thoughts: How could she not have told anyone? Did she not know how dangerous it was to just go around untreated? She could relapse at any moment. And then I remembered: most suicides hope to die without interference. Telling someone means allowing the person you told the chance to stop you. I had discovered something like the back passageway she’d left open.

  Staring at those tiny letters, I realized I was meeting the person she actually was, underneath her performance of competence. All her life since then she had been waiting to see if someone would notice, and I had. And then another cold truth came to me out of those tiny letters.

  I was almost exactly like her.

  All of my attempts at therapy previous to this had been about the issues that moved above certain ruptures in myself that remained undescribed. The difference was that I had never raged that a therapist had not figured this out about me. If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured, I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride in believing I was passing as whole.

  3

  PRIOR TO THE MEMORY’s return, if you asked me, I would tell you there were things in my life that I couldn’t remember. I would allow you to think that they were like your own missing memories, gaps made by pure human fallibility and impressionistic thinking. Associations that didn’t associate. And yet I recall feeling an empty confidence at those times, the hollow power of a lie. When I began Edinburgh, I knew there was something missing, something I wasn’t letting myself know. It is just one of the reasons why I wrote it as a novel instead of a memoir. I had written it as if the memory would never come back—as if this could stand in for it. I had imagined the missing memories were gone forever. I thought of the novel as the solution for what was lost.

  Instead, it was a summoning. As if I had called and it came back to me.

  Even now, though, as I try to write this essay, it dissolves in my hands. There is still a part of me that insists what I’ll tell you cannot be told. That insists that if the truth were known I would be destroyed. I try to write this essay and freeze, lose the path, lose my thoughts, my drafts, my edits, all of my purpose. I look up at the ticking clock in front of me and stop. My editor writes back, curious: What happened to this? And I am also mystified to find what I thought was the careful draft full of repetitions, mistakes, missing pieces.

  My writing process is informed in general by my relationship to this—a process with a deep mistrust of myself.

  The impulse to hide this from myself and others pushes at me. I change my sense of the structure again and again, moving events around, until the document becomes a mass of repetitions and fragments, elliptical, incomplete. A self-portrait.

  Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse. They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn’t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you. They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect themselves from being revealed as burned.

  You imagine that the worst thing is that someone would know. The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you. And it will—it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself. The worst thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay waste to your whole life by hiding.

  You could mistake your ability to go this far for strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed of everything else about yourself. This endurance, at least—this you can admire. You were too young to know what you believe is your complicity was something taken from you, but in your silence, you have become complicit with the continued pain, the wound that risks replacing you the longer you let it stay. But among the things you cannot imagine is that anyone would understand, or be kind. This is all you understand.

  When I ask myself why it was so hard for me to let this secret go, the answer is that holding on to it was the only source of my self-esteem for years. It was all I thought I had.

  I’m sorry, is what I would have wanted to have my replacement say in that documentary. Sorry I was so lonely as a child. Sorry that I was a child, with a child’s reasoning. Sorry I didn’t understand how this man could be punished, as I had only ever seen children punished. Sorry I dreamed of a kiss and then, when I accepted it, didn’t know how it would make my mouth a grave. Myself living inside of it. Sorry that years later, for having had that kiss, I would boast of avoiding the pain that was eating me alive from the inside out, and that this would be said on film, and it would go everywhere, around the world. Sorry for at least that, and more than that. But I wouldn’t know this for years.

  Edinburgh is a palinode. The gods, offended by a speech, require the speaker to make another, its opposite. Phaedrus, quoted in Edinburgh, is one example of this form. But there were no gods to make me do this, just me. And after it was published, the work wasn’t done.

  4

  THIS IS THE MEMORY I put away.

  In September 1978, I am eleven, asleep in a dream in which I am at a lake with a boy who is a year older than me, a boy I know from choir. He lives one town over from me. We sometimes carpool. He’s as beautiful as the elves are supposed to be in the games I play about magic and wizards. He has blond hair and incandescent blue eyes.

  In the dream he swims toward me, his hair plastered dark against his head. He chuckles and it echoes lightly. He reaches up from the water and gives me a kiss, a spark in his eyes. An excitement that is just for me.

  I wake up in the morning dark. The dream is so real, I expect my mouth to be wet.

  I’m gay is the first thought. And I am in love with him.

  The choir is my refuge. My secret kingdom, an escape from the children who set traps for me at sc
hool. Classmates who have spent years tricking me into humiliating setups—pretending to befriend me before turning on me, or simply attacking me—situations that end with me being demoralized and alone. I had never encountered racism before this—in Guam, I was just one of many multiracial children in a diverse group of students. The intensity of it leaves me full of despair. In photos of me as a child, you can see that the light in my eyes at age six leaves my eyes in the photos of me at age seven, just a year after the move to Maine.

  My mother was called in for annual visits with my teachers, during which she was told that I inhabited a dream world of fantasy, and that I would have to live in the real world eventually. Afterward, she would come home and tell me this, and each time I would say, I don’t have to live in the real world. Coolly, flatly, as if she were telling me I had to live in Boston and I could refuse. By the time I joined the choir at age eleven, it had been five years of being called a flat-faced chink, or being made fun of because I like to play with girls, who, yes, were all white, and soon joined in these traps organized by the white boys at my school. My nickname at this time is Nature Boy, because I like to go off into the woods alone, and part of the reason I like it is that I don’t have to be with them, see them, think of them. But the choir is made up of boys like me, and I soon enjoy a popularity there I’ve never had. I have friends, finally. Now my mother warns me about too many sleepovers, or of Dungeons & Dragons games that go on too long.

  The boy from the dream is a part of this, though not entirely. He doesn’t like D & D as much as my other friends do. I don’t see him except at rehearsals. He is one of the soloists, and his voice is as beautiful as he is, if not more so. When I’m invited to go on a section leaders’ camping trip with the director, I accept eagerly, knowing he’ll be going also. The car is small for the four of us—a Pacer—and the dream boy sits in my lap, laughing, relaxed. He seems not just to touch me, but to meld, and I’m in a kind of bliss I didn’t imagine.