How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  More or less you, but not you.

  Or it is remorseful in exactly the same way as you, but something else is what changes as you write it, until you understand you and it are apart.

  If you are a professor, then the character is a professor. If you are tall, he is tall. Angry, then angry. But then change other things that will make the difference.

  Give the character your name only if it will make this difference plain. Anything else is museum theater.

  Or choose a name with the same music.

  Invent the other characters also, the same way.

  Or change all the names. Change everything.

  Use the names of neither the willing nor the unwilling. Especially those who will change from willing to unwilling once the novel is published and they understand what they have given you.

  Know that this may be anyone, even you.

  You do this because you must betray this character in the way all writers betray all of their characters, done to reveal the ways they are human.

  To do less than this is only PR.

  You have invented this self because the ways you are human are not always visible to yourself. All of this a machine to make yourself more human.

  For this reason, be prepared, always, to stop and set the novel aside until you are prepared to do what you must do.

  Why is it not a memoir? people will ask.

  I tell more truth in fiction, you might say. You hope this is true.

  The memoir a kind of mask too, but one that insists you are only one person.

  All fiction is autobiographical, people say. People who say this want to believe it more than any novel itself, much less the one you wrote.

  It is time to speak of the price.

  The price is you do not get it back after you write it, whatever you took from yourself for its heart.

  Give this over, then, only if you can make something greater than what you had.

  Anyone who unhappily saw themselves in your characters will most likely see themselves, even if they were not described. Those you do include will pass themselves by, seeing themselves in other characters.

  The legal standard is that a stranger must be able to recognize the character in life from the description in the novel before the person can sue.

  You cannot sue yourself.

  There is another standard for yourself, and its demands and punishments will stand unrevealed until you find the book finished, out in the world, waiting in the place where you once lived.

  Anyone not in your life will believe it is your life, and sometimes the people in your life will too, despite what they might remember.

  This price is paid until no one is left alive.

  Here are the warnings, then, dressed as thieves.

  You can’t stop me, you think. I must do this, you are thinking.

  I will not stop you and I don’t want to. You will stop you. A hundred times. A thousand.

  You lost in the trap of “that happened,” and you struggle because “that is how that really happened,” and yet you cannot make it convincing in fiction, cannot figure out what happens next.

  Your novel only an anecdote, your plot a series of aversions, dodges in disguises, trauma dressed as friends saying, “Yes you can no you can’t yes you can.”

  Ready to steal as much of your life as you let them, more than what they already have taken.

  One last price, hidden behind the rest.

  Write fiction about your life and pay with your life, at least three times.

  Here is the ax.

  On Becoming an American Writer

  1

  HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I thought the world would end?

  This was the question that appeared in my head the morning after the election, the election that for now we all speak of only as “the election,” as if there will never be any other. The question appeared like a black balloon determined to follow me around, bobbing in and out of my vision, a response to my first thought: This is the end of the world.

  I was standing in my kitchen, at the stove. I was supposed to teach a class that morning. Canceling the class seemed out of the question, though I did not know how to do all of the things that would get me there. The coffee seemed impossible to make, as did breakfast. Going downstairs, getting into the car, driving the twenty minutes south to the college where I teach. Walking into the classroom. I couldn’t imagine any of that.

  What I did imagine: a white supremacist, evangelical Christian, theocratic, militaristic government. My Muslim friends rounded up and deported. Being hunted by right-wing militias for being gay, or for being mixed race, or both. Climate departure, the next step after climate change, when the weather turns in violent shifts, monsoons and blizzards, floods and freezing. The ocean a hot soup, empty of life. A government opposed to environmental protections, labor protections, abortion, birth control, and equal access to health care.

  I was, I knew, in shock. The previous night, when the results seemed final, my partner of three years had proposed marriage, and I had accepted. We decided to marry before the laws could be changed, and I knew it would help if we ever needed to seek asylum. Before this, my now husband had expressed a deep antipathy to even the idea of marriage. My sister called afterward, distraught, having just been able to put her children to bed—they had begged her to move, to leave the country. That had all happened between 2:30 and 3:30 a.m.

  My phone was in my hand. A tingling and numbness ran from the top of my left shoulder all the way down to where my phone digs into my palm, pushing on a nerve there when I scrolled with one hand, as I did, walking from room to room in disbelief and horror. This is what I was doing just before I came to a stop in the kitchen. The pain that began that day lasted almost a year.

  I checked Facebook, an autonomic response. WHAT WILL YOU TEACH, my friend the poet Solmaz Sharif had posted.

  What will I teach? What do I know? This somehow brought me out of my trance. But I was still motionless in front of my stove.

  Can you make coffee? I asked myself. No. Can you buy a coffee? Yes. Go buy a coffee, I told myself.

  I put on a coat. I got my coffee and a breakfast sandwich and drove south to the school. The views along Interstate 91, of the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, usually console me, but that day all I could think about on that drive was the death of the world.

  I ARRIVED IN THE college’s town to find it as empty as if classes were canceled. As I walked to my office, a young woman left the library and crossed the strangely empty lawn. As she drew closer, I saw tears streaming down her face. She did not look at me.

  In my office, as I collected the materials for class, I overheard another young woman crying as she described her anger to a colleague about the future in a country that had elected a sexual predator as president.

  What will you teach?

  It felt as if a president had been assassinated, but the president was alive. Instead, the country we thought we would be living in was dead. As if a president had assassinated a country.

  I walked into my classroom. My students were all present. The room was very quiet, and tense, as if they were trying to find a way to tell me one of them had died. Many of them were crying or had just stopped crying. I hadn’t been sure if any of them would be celebrating the new president before this, but now it was clear none of them were.

  “I’m not going to pretend last night didn’t happen,” I said. “Let’s just talk about whatever it is we need to talk about.”

  “What is the point,” one of my most talented students asked after the shortest pause. “What is the point even of writing, if this can happen?”

  THE DAY THE UNITED States invaded Iraq in 2003, I was at my alma mater, Wesleyan University, preparing to teach the next day. In the art professor’s apartment I was subletting, I watched the news of the invasion on his antique television, the screen the size of a paperback book. I was surrounded by art as a segment aired declaring that the museums and antiquities of the
ancient Persian culture preceding Saddam Hussein would likely be destroyed by American shelling. A country’s historic legacy lost, perhaps forever. To these concerns, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was shown, responding to this. He offered, “What’s a few less old pots?”

  He was chipper, even affable, as he said it. He thought he was funny. Yes, who wants them? Who wants any of it? A strange chill dropped over me, the sort of shadow felt even in the night. How cheerful he was as he consigned these parts of one of the world’s oldest cultures, the source of so much of our art, literature, and science, to rubble. I turned off the television and sat alone and angry in the cold apartment, a pile of manuscripts to mark next to me.

  What was the point? The task of being a writer suddenly felt inadequate. As did I. That next morning at Wesleyan, I faced something entirely new in my teaching career: I didn’t know what to say to my students. And I very much wanted to know.

  2

  MY GENERATION OF WRITERS—and yours, if you are reading this—lives in the shadow of Auden’s famous attack on the relevance of writing to life, when he wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” I had heard the remark repeated so often and for so long I finally went looking for its source, to try to understand what it was he really meant by it. Because I knew it was time for me to really argue with it. If not for myself, for my students.

  Auden wrote this line in an elegy for Yeats. And Yeats, it should be said, was a hero of Auden’s. To read the whole poem is to know he meant, if not the opposite of what this line is so often used to say, something at least more subtle: an ironic complaint. This isn’t even the sharpest line Auden wrote on the subject. But somehow, the line handed anyone who cared a weapon to gut the confidence of over fifty years’ worth of writers in the West. As we faced the inexorable creep of William F. Buckley’s intellectual conservatism that used anti-intellectualism as its arrowhead, this attitude, that writing is powerless, is one that affects you even if you have never read that poem, much less the quote. Pundits, reviewers, and critics spit it out repeatedly, as often now as ever, hazing anyone who might imagine anything to the contrary. I don’t blame Auden or Yeats, who had both hoped to inspire political change with their poetry earlier in their lives. His poem meant to express his disillusionment. I don’t think Auden meant it as a call to stop trying. But America was a young enough country, American literature was young also. It was easier to believe that we were wrong than to believe what writers around the world believe: that we matter, and that it is our duty, to matter.

  STUDENTS OFTEN ASK ME whether I think they can be a writer. I tell them I don’t know. Because it depends, first and foremost, on whether you want to be one. This question is not as simple to answer as it seems. The difficulties are many, even if you truly want to be a writer. What seems to separate those who write from those who don’t is being able to stand it.

  “I started with writers more talented than me,” Annie Dillard had said in the class I took from her in college. “And they’re not writing anymore. I am.” I remember, as a student, thinking, Why wouldn’t you do the work? What could possibly stop you?

  I began teaching writers in the fall of 1996, at a continuing education program based on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I called it the MASH unit of creative writing, because you can’t turn anyone away from your classes there. The program pays instructors what it has always paid them, even now, twenty years later, and they do so because there is always an MFA graduate like me who needs a first teaching job, and every other place that offers writing classes in New York is more or less like this. But I loved my students, and what I still value of this experience is that it was there that I first discovered that good writing was, as Annie had said to us, very teachable. Talent mattered less than it was made to seem to matter. I watched in my first classes as I applied techniques I’d been taught to students who seemed at first to be unlikely writers and they turned into excellent ones. I learned a different kind of humility there in the face of their efforts, which I think still serves me as a teacher: you don’t know who will make it and who will not, and students’ previous work may or may not be an indicator of what they can do, good or bad.

  Most of what Annie had taught me was about habits of mind and habits of work. As long as these continued, I imagined, so would the writing. I will always want my students to know that if what you write matters enough, it makes no difference where you write it, or if you have a desk, or if you have quiet, and so on. If the essay or novel or poem wants to be written, it will speak to you while the conductor is calling out the streets. The question is, will you listen? And listen regularly?

  Teaching these classes I also learned what could stop a writer. So many of the students in my classes were stuck. Some were struggling with a story they both wanted to tell and had forbidden themselves from telling. Some were struggling with a family story that they believed, if told, would destroy their family, or them, or their relationship to the family. A close friend to this day will not write the novel he wants to write about his late mother, who was closeted until he came out to her, and she then came out to him. He is afraid of the reaction of a single cousin.

  Why does the talented student of writing stop? It is usually the imagination, turned to creating a story in which you are a failure, and all you have done has failed, and you are made out to be the fraud you’ve feared you are. You can imagine the story you might tell, or you can imagine this other story—both will be extraordinarily detailed, but only one will be something you can publish. The other will freeze you in place, in a private theater of pain that seats one. These writers were—are, in many cases—people who know how to write. What they don’t know is how to become unstuck. How to leave that theater they made for themselves, how to stop telling themselves the story that freezes them.

  I discovered I needed to teach not just how to write, but how to keep writing. How to face up to who you think is listening. Is the person listening more important than you? Or is the story you would tell more important than you? I was teaching how to stand up and leave that room in your mind so you can go and write—and live. But the question after that, always, is, Live with what?

  And one answer was always going to be America.

  WHEN I WAS A student of writing in college, I was guilty of believing that I would have the sort of life of an author that proceeded along lines that kept me well within the limits of the middle class. It is the American art trap: make art but be a good member of your social class. A friend of mine even has a belief that I think is worth testing—that the primary deciding factor of whether a writer becomes a writer is their relationship to being middle class. If they are working class or upper class, or even an aristocrat, they are at least comfortable betraying that class in order to write.

  Put another way: Will you be able to write and also eat, or even eat well? Will you have to work another job? Will you be able to pay for health care, a house, dental work, retirement?

  These fantasies frayed and fell apart fast enough as the two places I chose to focus my career—writing and teaching—have both met with extraordinary income destruction in the last two decades. I learned quickly that if you stop writing, nothing happens, but I also learned that I had nowhere else to go. I mastered my diligence in the face of that, but I am still not free of the demon that can stop me in my tracks and make me doubt my sense of my own worth and power. And there isn’t just a single demon, nor are they only personal ones at that. You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world—and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. And that to do otherwise is to fail art, the country, and yourself. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the country it could become.

  I READ THE FIRST review of my first novel on the Thursday af
ter September 11, 2001, in the empty computer center of a dormitory at the girls’ school in Maryland where my sister worked. My brother and I had left the city together. He lived seven blocks from Ground Zero, and I, with my history of asthma, found that for the first time in decades, I was unable to breathe easily even out in Brooklyn, where I lived, as long as the site continued to burn. So we left for a week to take a break from the air. We were very naïve to think the fire would be out by then. I will always remember the cloud of smoke, as long as the island of Manhattan, visible from the Verrazano Bridge.

  As I read the review—a rave, the sort of review you hope for as a debut author—I had the sense of being a character in a science-fiction film, one in which the writer, who finally sees his novel published, then watches as the world ends.

  We did return to New York eventually. The world did not end. Instead, all through that fall, people said things to me like, It’s too bad your book isn’t about the war, and I said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say. I taught my writing classes at the New School, where I was teaching then, and each time I passed through Union Square station, I consulted the thousands of flyers for missing persons, in case one of them was someone I knew. I thought of how my own flyer might read, with the details people who knew me would decide might be helpful if you had to find me, and you might find only an arm, or the body but no head. For one terrible moment, I resolved to acquire more distinguishing characteristics in case this happened to me, though I discarded the idea as a mania driven by fear. I boarded empty flights to the two readings my publisher could afford to send me to, and ate the extra meals the nervous flight attendants offered. I went and spoke on the radio, answering questions about my book that was not about the war, and met readers, and more reviews appeared.