How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  I remember my dream of the lake and the kiss, and it seems certain to come true.

  We park the car at the trail’s parking lot and set off. During this hike to our campsite, the director jokes about how it is so hot we should hike nude. This seems impossible to me. He frequently talks to us about nudism, American prudery, sexual immaturity. How children should be able to vote, divorce their parents, choose whom they want to have sex with.

  At the campsite, after the tent is set up, he begins to take off his clothes.

  You don’t have to take off your clothes, he says to me.

  But the other boys do, and soon they are all swimming together naked in the swimming hole we have chosen for our campsite. And so I take off my clothes and jump in. He takes photos of us, but especially of my dream boy, who is clearly his favorite, and who poses happily.

  Soon it is evening and we are all in the tent. We are all still naked. The director has told me he knew about the crush, and he wants us to kiss. That the kiss is something he wants to see. The dream boy had told him of my feelings for him, and they had used it to bring me here. The director smiles as he tells me this, as if he hopes I will be amused, and also indulge him. The dream boy is there in front of me, also smiling at me, kneeling, naked, coming closer. There seems to be no way out, as if something is being cut off from me even as it is offered, and I can’t prevent it. As the kiss happens, I like it and hate it at the same time.

  This is my first kiss.

  After that night, the dream boy will never kiss me again. I will still want it. It is as if I didn’t get it, not like I wanted, and everything is wrong afterward.

  I included something like this scene in the novel. I describe looking at my face’s reflection, and how this is when I began wanting to die.

  I had, until that day in the bar in Brooklyn, remembered most of it except for the dream and what the dream led me to do. What I cannot, do not, let myself remember in that tent is the reason why I despaired. I put away the dream that night, and any memory of how I believed it was a dream coming true. I put away how I hated my silence, my inability to act, my shame at being humiliated this way—to have my secret known by those I thought were my friends, who then only used it against me. My despair was the despair of realizing that this was just another trap, that there was perhaps no end of traps. The boy from my dream was there to make everything the director was doing to me and the other boys seem okay. This trip is the extent of the director’s interest in me this way. He never tries to be alone with me again. He only wanted to control what I wanted—access to his favorite—and when I received it, and how.

  As an adult, I understand my powerlessness. I can see I was in the woods without access to a phone or a car or another adult. I now know that the director chose me in part because my family was in crisis—he knew my mother needed a place for me to be after school, and that I needed the refuge the choir offered. Until the camping trip, the choir had been like a paradise for me: other boys who were smart, who liked me, who didn’t mock me, who wanted me as their friend, just for who I was. I can see that I was only a tool to the director, and this display of power over my desires was done to put me in my place. And that new place was to make everything seem okay to the other boys, much like my own dream boy had done for me. But what’s new, supplied by the memory, is how I gave up then, gave up believing my life could ever be any better. I would never escape the people intent on humiliating me. There was no place for me in this world, and there was nothing I could do about it. The despair I have lived with my whole life overtook me then, and until that kiss in the bar twenty-five years later, I had kept this secret, even from myself.

  I was twelve when I put this memory away. The force exerting itself in my life was the power of pure childhood imagination, unmediated by any sense of my own power to speak, to create understanding and compassion. Instead, there was in me a dream of fear, so powerful I made a doll of myself to stay in my place, and I ran away. The doll woke up, stretched, looked around, and believed it was me.

  5

  IMAGINE WALKING INTO YOUR apartment and finding someone ripping up a piece of paper. You put your hand on his arm and this person turns to face you. It is you.

  You read the paper, and as you do, you feel as if you are falling into it, endlessly, away from yourself and into yourself at the same time.

  In the months after the memory returned, I continued with my life as best I could. But my recovered memory, for me, was like receiving a telegram one morning and finding inside the answer to twenty-five years’ worth of mistakes, twenty-five years of confusion and pain, and watching as around me the day turned as black as night. There was a story I needed to understand, the one I had tried to avoid, and it was all I wanted to listen to, and everything else I had to do was in the way.

  The young writer I’d been involved with eventually moved on that fall. We never really spoke of what had happened, or whatever it was we’d unsealed for each other—my attempts at such conversations did not end well. Like me at his age, he did not seem ready to speak of it. We remain friends.

  There was one more story I was inside of then, yet another stereograph. The one from the spring. The one in which I was someone who had not told his therapist the story he needed to tell.

  THE FIRST NEW THERAPIST I found had been recommended to me by a friend. As her office was near where I was living at the time in New York, and she had helped my friend to a remarkable recovery after a sexual assault, and that friend had recommended her highly, I went. This therapist listened to me for ten or fifteen minutes as I described why I had come to her, and then she said, “I’m not sure I know how to help you. The people I work with usually can’t even name what happened to them, much less write a novel about it.”

  I was suddenly very aware that I was sitting on a couch surrounded by stuffed animals and toys, as if I were visiting a nursery. I wondered if the toys were for her other patients even as I knew they were, and I fought the impulse to pick one up. She told me I seemed fine, perhaps a little neurotic, at least not as damaged as others—not in danger. She agreed to keep seeing me, and I did see her twice more. But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I’d had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end—the word FINE painted on it.

  I had even used this image of the lightning-struck tree in the novel I’d written, and it was just one of the ways the novel allowed that hidden self to speak in public. The novel that seemed, that day, to have become yet another obstacle for me.

  I thanked her and left. When I reached the dark sidewalk, I told myself I would find another therapist. But I felt something new. A wild fury of failing—no one believes I am not fine; why does no one believe it?—thundered in my head as I stood there. The one who knew he was still burning was trying to say so. And the one who was determined to say nothing did not allow it.

  I had told my story but I had not told my story. I had written a novel and found catharsis, but I had not found healing, had not found recuperation. I had read self-help books to research the novel about sexual abuse, but I had not done the work, had not applied those books to myself as much as I had used them as a map to a character. Through it all I kept telling myself that nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me. I was fine.

  But I was not fine. It would take me four years to try again. As I examine the reasons why, I first find a strange little lie that does not add up when I examine it: an angry feeling that the therapist did not believe me. But she did. She simply told me she couldn’t help me. And the copy of me who believed I could be fine without ever speaking of it took over again. No one believes you, the copy told me. A last—last?—lie. For that night, at least. I am built for this ter
rible pain, I told myself, and sent myself on my way.

  I LEFT THE APARTMENT in the sky when the sublet there ended and moved back to Brooklyn briefly, to an ill-fated rental there, a one-bedroom apartment with an unfinished wood floor my landlord tried to pass off as hardwood—the carpet staples still in it. I did not complain, unable to tell him he was lying to me. I didn’t bother to unpack, and three months later moved out to Los Angeles—another sublet, this time with a friend in Koreatown, a share in his 4,000-square-foot apartment in a building named for a silent-film star, where I drove his borrowed white Porsche and tried very hard to be who I thought I should be at parties filled with professionally beautiful people I vaguely remembered or didn’t know at all.

  I told myself I was chasing pleasure after so much grief. That I was writing my new novel. But I was desperate to escape the slow creep of deadness inside, the paralysis I felt in the face of this memory and all that came with it. The grief at following my dream of a boy into the woods, into what was just another trap in what felt like an unending series of traps. That I was still doing this was lost on me, though it came to me in moments, and I pushed the knowledge away each time. The paralysis that had stopped me again and again, this was what I was trying to kick away. I ran from myself by moving across the country, and even did the move twice, once out to Los Angeles and then back again, to Maine. I told myself I was making smart decisions, and sometimes I was—selling my second novel, applying to the MacDowell Colony, applying for a job at Amherst College—but that feeling followed me, the feeling of needing to stop and also to scream, as if I thought I could stop what was freezing me from the inside out by scaring it out of me. And there was always a new man, another will-o’-the-wisp of desire that I followed into whatever woods I found. With each move, a raft of boxes followed me, many never unpacked, joined by new ones full of unanswered mail from the previous address.

  FOUR YEARS WENT BY.

  When I finally found another therapist, I picked him by calling several therapists in the area and listening to their voices—I chose him for his timbre and tone. I went to him for what I thought would be triage after a breakup, something I’d done before. I had just moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, to begin a new job, and I had broken up with my boyfriend shortly after arriving, having discovered a sexually transmitted disease, despite being in what was supposed to have been a monogamous relationship. As I had caught him, the previous fall, trolling online for sex with strangers, and after discussing whether we wanted new rules—non-monogamy, specifically—or an end to our relationship—we had continued, as he’d insisted he wanted neither to be in an open relationship nor to end our relationship. This time, however, after certifying I had gotten my little hygiene problem in the way I believed I had—from him—I ended the relationship with no discussion. It was a minor illness but an unacceptable risk. This was what I thought I would be talking about with the therapist. And while it was where we began, we soon went elsewhere.

  I had been talking about the patterns in my ex’s relationships, but the therapist kept turning me back to mine. He told me I had to stop trying to understand my ex and just accept the fact of him. I needed instead to understand myself. My habit of chasing after a fantasy. Do you know this phrase, the therapist with the nice voice asked me after a number of sessions, “In repetition is forgetting”?

  I don’t, I said.

  It’s Freud, he said. It refers to the Freudian repetition cycle. We repeat something so that we can forget the pain of it. We set out to get it right instead, to fix what went wrong. But we can never fix the past, he said. We then only repeat it.

  In repetition is forgetting.

  He was a popular therapist in this town, and in conversation with a friend who was also seeing him, he had mentioned that one of our therapist’s specialties was treating gay men with a history of sexual abuse. I had silently noted this.

  We can only break the future, came the thought.

  There is something I should tell you, I said.

  And there, on his office sofa, I remembered my student who had never told her therapist enough, and began at last to try to tell someone everything.

  I AM WRITING THIS from my future. The one I made from the one I broke, possibly only after that day.

  The therapist gave me an exercise. You can’t get rid of the guardians who’ve kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they’ve been doing since you were a child.

  I had never thought of them as protectors. The liar on the screen. The one who hid his wound from his mother in shame. The one who kept his hurt secret from his other therapists, trying, alone, to fix himself, unable to even think of saying the words. But finally able to write them. Of course each one was doing what I’d essentially told them to do, even if I no longer felt that way or wanted it done. They all were.

  And then there was the one who’d left me the fragments of that novel like a trail through the woods, from the land I was in to this one. The one planning this world that the novel would make.

  I had written a novel that, after it was published, let me practice saying what I remembered out loud for years until the day I could remember all of it. Until I could be the person who could stand it. The person who wrote that novel, he was waiting for me.

  How To Write an Autobiographical Novel

  I WILL TELL ONLY the truth, you decide. It’s right there, after all. Like you could hold it, perfect, in one try.

  This vision of the novel you are sure you can write sits in your life like a gift from any god you might be willing to believe in. As suddenly real as any unexpected visitor.

  You must write it, you decide. It would be so easy.

  You watch each other, carefully, for years.

  When you begin, you are like someone left in the woods with an ax and a clear memory of houses, deciding to build a house.

  You decide you will teach yourself to furnish everything with that ax. You are the ax. The woods is your life.

  And yet when you sit down to try, the perfection is gone.

  The beautiful symmetry, the easy way of it, all of it is replaced by awkwardness, something worse than if your mind made only noise.

  When you stop, dejected, you see it again, perfect again. As if it is mocking you.

  Soon you learn that you see it only when you do not try.

  Thinking this may be its way of stopping you, but either way, you stop trying. And then start. And then stop.

  Perhaps you are unfamiliar with why you would try to undo yourself. Why you would be your own worst enemy or best friend, or that person who is sometimes both. Now you try to live with what you know.

  You still see it, even if it eludes you when you reach for it. What is the way into the place where it is? you wonder.

  Perhaps it is like the Venetian towns built to confuse pirates. You think you are headed toward the square with a fountain, and instead find yourself in an alley, or out along the cliff wall. Another life.

  There is that noise still in the mind, drawn over the surface of the entrance like camouflage.

  You find this only when you decide you must try again.

  You don’t know this yet, but gods, even when you don’t believe in them, do not give something easily. Not even when the god is you.

  You didn’t make this up, people say to you when finally you write it and give it to them to read.

  I did, you say, but you feel as if you have dropped your disguise.

  Is this me? they ask coldly. Their disguise, also dropped.

  You had hoped they also would see how perfect it was. You wonder if it is them, and you forgot somehow, you are stupid in some way you didn’t anticipate.

  The living reside uncomfortably in prose. This includes you.

  You like the child who believes they are invisible because they stood in a shadow.

  This person, your reader, now says, There is no plot.

  You see this also. The novel revealed now as a string of anecd
otes, and you cannot see what comes before or after. The events of your life like an empty field and you there, shouting, “Novel!”

  The writer who cried “Novel!,” yes. Yes, that was you.

  Invent something that fits the shape of what you know.

  To do this, use the situations but not the events of your life.

  Invent a character like you, but not you.

  You, in the forest of yourself with the ax, building the house, sealing yourself within its walls.

  You are the ghost of the house you build and never live in, this house you make of your life.

  The space you occupy more like the space between the wall and the paint.

  This also the difference between you and the one you have invented to be you.

  This golem of the self, this house, now something anyone could visit and understand. Unlike you. That is what you hope for now.

  This golem more or less careless than you, more or less selfish, more or less remorseful.