How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  There were news reports of an epidemic of writer’s block in New York City, and after those appeared there were reports of writer’s block in many other parts of the world too. Writers known and unknown spoke of how they couldn’t think of writing anything that approached the scale of the attacks. As if this were the task.

  I didn’t know anyone who was lost that day. When I think of the lost, I think mostly of a man I heard speaking on the radio on the morning of the attacks. He had called the station from inside the first tower to describe what was happening. The host quickly thanked him for calling in and then said, in a bit of a panic, Why are you on the phone with me? Why aren’t you on your way down?

  You don’t understand, the man said. The whole center of the building is gone. I can’t go down. That’s why I’m calling.

  I don’t know how to describe the feeling I had in the silence that followed, except that it was approximately the length it would take you to read this sentence aloud.

  What do you mean the whole center’s gone? the host asked, the panic in his voice no longer slight.

  I mean, I can see down the center of the building, he said. The stairs are just . . . gone.

  Then the line went dead, and the radio host was weeping, asking us all to pray for the missing caller.

  Later we would know for sure the towers had fallen. In that instant, I did not know, though I felt certain. It was unbearable. I turned off the radio. I was in my apartment, about to make coffee for myself, but found I had none. The enormity of what had happened was not yet clear, but I decided if the world was going to end that day, I was going to need coffee to face it. I left to get some at the corner café where I knew a couple of my friends would be working. I could get coffee and be less alone. In the hallway, I saw people leaving the building as if it were an ordinary day. They did not know what had happened. I didn’t know how to tell them. I blurted it out.

  They looked at me as if I were insane. As if their disbelief could make it not true.

  At the café, I found my friends had scalded themselves with spilled coffee when the first news of the attacks came on the radio, and so I helped them do what they needed to do to close the store, and then, as we prepared to leave, I noticed, outside the window, what seemed to be faint grayish snow was beginning to fall out of the sky.

  Is it snowing? one of my friends asked, incredulous.

  I thought of a date I’d gone on two days earlier, with a welder. I had been interested in his work. Can you burn steel? I remembered asking.

  Yes, he said. And he told me the temperature at which steel burned like firewood, 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

  It would be disputed later, all of it, all the details of that day. Whether the steel had burned, the heat of the fire, whether the planes had set off the destruction or the building had been rigged to blow. A “false flag” operation, some said. I would, and still do, doubt whether I heard the radio conversation I heard, though it is nothing I would ever make up. All I knew in that moment was that this ash was from the towers, a mix of the building and those who had died in it and the plane that had struck it, and that we could not breathe in what was falling, and yet none of us could endure waiting to leave, because who knew how long it would be before another attack?

  Get some sort of wet cloth, I said. We each need one. A napkin or a bandanna.

  We bound wet cloths over our faces and heads. When you get home, I said, take off your clothes and put them in a plastic bag and throw them away. Then take a shower.

  They stared at me.

  This is the ash from the towers burning, I said.

  And so my friends and I walked home this way, wet cloths over our noses and mouths, through the falling ash in Park Slope, miles from the site. We waved goodbye to each other, saying nothing.

  After taking off my clothes and putting them in a trash bag and showering, I went to make sure my windows were sealed. I had a very specific fear: I did not want to breathe them in. It seemed disrespectful. There was talk for months afterward of recovering the bodies of the missing, yet I knew on the walk home that the ash that day held most of the remains. I thought of the families, how they might react if they knew what the ash was. Later that day I regarded the pale gray snow that had fallen over my garden with the attitude of someone visiting a grave. When I returned from a trip to Maryland a week later, rain had washed the garden clean. But I knew they were still there.

  Three years later, as I prepared to leave the apartment, I found the trash bag on the floor of my closet. I had never gotten rid of the clothes. I finally threw them away.

  WHEN WRITERS IN NEW York complained they could not write after 9/11, it seemed to me they were frozen by writing for that audience, by writing for the missing. Who we all felt, somehow, were watching. Waiting to see if we were worthy of being alive when they were dead. Waiting to see the stories we would tell about the life they would no longer have among us—waiting to see if it was worth it.

  3

  IN THE WINTER BEFORE the war in Iraq, I lost two friends, one old, one new.

  The first friend died of cancer in December 2002. She was just thirty-six. She had been misdiagnosed by her doctor. First she was told she had a rash, and then that she was imagining the severity of it. She was told to take antidepressants. After further tests, she learned she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A lifelong hypochondriac who always looked to be in the bloom of health, she had finally fallen seriously ill and was not believed. And when she eventually was believed, when the truth of her disease was incontrovertible, there was not time enough to undo the damage, and she succumbed. She had once been my boss at a magazine launched in the early nineties. I had met her in San Francisco, when she was the girlfriend of my boyfriend’s roommate. When I moved to New York to be closer to my boyfriend, she and I sometimes spent whole days together. She herself dreamed of writing a novel one day, and in the meantime wrote poems more or less in secret, showing them rarely. When I was an editor of an experimental literary journal called XXX Fruit, we asked her for poems, and published some of them. I remember looking at the typeset page and thinking of it as a picture of her secret self.

  By then, she had moved on to a job at a national weekly newsmagazine, which she loved, though the responsibilities often crushed what energy she might have had to write. Or at least this was what she said. Most writers I know say they don’t have enough time to write. It’s usually a feint.

  Her lover, a poet and novelist, spoke at the memorial service of how, during the eight months she was hospitalized, my friend would tell her stories in the dark, lights out, late into the night, about their life. The stories about them were set in the future but told in the present tense. In that imagined life, it went without saying, she had been healed of her cancer, and they had pets, a house in Woodstock, friends coming over for weekends. She had thought through every detail, down to the burial of their cats at the property’s edge.

  She never liked to go to sleep.

  Alone with her death’s approach, she had told stories in her bed. She’d finally written her novel for the woman she loved, insisting on something past what was allowed them.

  What would you read to someone who was dying? Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

  I THINK OF THIS friend whenever I am reminded of the abandoned projects I have in my office, going back for years. This essay was one of them. Being a writer can feel a lot like writing and giving up on writing at the same time. I wrote this paragraph in a small office I kept in my home in Rochester, New York, in 2005, full of unfinished stories, unfinished essays, unfinished novels. Twelve years later, I’m editing it on a plane back from Florence, Italy, on my way to a conference at Yale, where my friend did her undergraduate degree.

  In the first decade after her death, each time I would move, I would sift through the boxes, organizing the papers, and find, again
and again, the CD that was made for her memorial service, the picture on it of her as a girl, sunburned, her auburn hair short, her eyes squinting in the sun. Water wings on her arms. I keep it next to my bed now, where I sleep with my husband. The boxes are in our cabin near Woodstock, where the ghosts of my friend’s future twenty years ago are among my neighbors. The boxes still tell me about myself, the writer I was and the writer I am and will be, the man who once believed in their contents and the man who still struggles to do so. Until now, when there’s no more waiting.

  Consider, if you will, the sin of despair.

  OF THE SEVEN DEADLY sins, despair is the sin of hopelessness, of believing there is no salvation. This sin can even be considered a heresy, as, to quote The Catholic Encyclopedia on the topic, it “implies an assent to a proposition which is against faith, e.g. that God has no mind to supply us with what is needful for salvation.” It is a sin because it is the belief that grace—God—will not provide.

  I was not raised a Catholic, but rather a kind of indifferent Methodist. I had no formal education in the sins, only the informal one, which is life.

  Who am I to despair? I remember a boyfriend who had what could be called a depression problem, speaking with him about his despair as he lay on my bed in the apartment with the garden, where I lived for seven years before I began my years of moving. He was a Jewish lawyer from New York, involved in progressive causes, working for a progressive law firm.

  He began chastising himself in my presence. You actually have a reason to be depressed, he said to me. Terrible things have happened to you. But you’re still happy. What’s my excuse?

  You represent the American Communist Party, I said. We laughed, but only because it was true.

  He was saying he did not think I was depressed, despite my difficulties, and he was right, I did not think of myself as depressed. I thought of myself as angry. Angry in the way of something held in waiting, otherwise silent or invisible. During this time, for example, writers would say in front of me, Nothing bad ever happened to me when I was a child. They were complaining about someone like me. As if they had been cheated out of being a person with the luck of terrible things having happened to them. Terrible things I was then unable to include in a novel because no one would believe them, or because I could not let myself remember. My therapist in Iowa thirteen years ago said to me, “If you were anyone else, I’d say you were paranoid. But you actually have been betrayed by many people in your life. You still have to learn to trust, though,” she said. “It’s still going to hold you back.”

  To quote again from The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on despair: “The pusillanimous person has not so much relinquished trust in God as he is unduly terrified at the spectacle of his own shortcomings or incapacity.”

  I am sometimes unduly terrified by my shortcomings, and I do not trust God. But at my worst, for now, I remember that one thing I still control is whether or not I give in. And then I go on.

  THE SECOND FRIEND I lost that year was a new friend, who died suddenly at the end of February 2003. Tom was his name. He was slightly older than me at forty, and healthy for a man as devoted as he was to good drink and good food, gay and HIV-positive. He managed a café on Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn, and for the two and a half years I knew him, I saw him almost exclusively after sunset, him making coffee, me ordering it. He had met me in the season when my first novel had appeared. He had read it and would praise it loudly to anyone standing next to me in line. Soon most of his regulars knew that I had published a novel, so I spent most of our friendship blushing. When he died, I was returning from a short second tour for the paperback.

  He met me, in other words, as the dream I’d had for the previous seven years was coming true. And I felt nearly dead from the effort of bringing it to fruition.

  He knew me entirely as a writer. This was not how I knew myself. It was why I blushed when he spoke of my book. He had never seen me get coffee with a tuxedo in a garment bag on my shoulder, running up the subway stairs in order to be on time to serve a formal dinner on Park Avenue. He had missed the nights when, after waiting tables at the steakhouse in midtown, I would arrive in the local gay bar in a starched white shirt, sleeves rolled, and drink pairs of bourbon and beer until closing.

  He mentioned that he sometimes wrote, and that he’d just come into an inheritance. He kept his job, but left on a dream trip through Europe, where he fell in love with a young man in Spain. It had almost come to something, but then it didn’t, and he returned from Spain, relaxed and tanned. Heartbreak seemed to have let him off the hook somehow. For something.

  In our last full conversation he told me about the novel he’d plotted and begun writing. When I arrived back from my book tour and returned to the café, expecting to see him, I found a young South African man with a mohawk pouring coffee in his place. I began to quietly panic. I knew Tom was HIV-positive, and would be absent only if something was very wrong.

  Indeed, the South African told me that Tom was in the hospital. I decided I would wait two days for the cough I had to go away, not wanting to risk infecting him. He died on the day in between.

  So many of my friends had been living with AIDS, I’d forgotten it could still kill them.

  Tom died on a Thursday night. A wake was planned for Sunday. I was asked to read something. I spent the next few days in a cloud of apologetic prayer that eventually pointed me to the idea of writing an elegy. I found myself in the odd position of doing what I often did, which is making a poem for a friend, but in this case, one he would never read. All the other times I’d written poems, for a birthday or a wedding, I’d written them with the idea that the poem would be heard by the person it was written for.

  I was able to write it only when I imagined him reading it. When I imagined giving it to him. I gave it instead to the owner of the café and his coworkers. They set it in the window, next to a picture of Tom in his sun hat in Spain, where it stayed for a year.

  The writing of elegies is something uncanny, and I use that word with the sense that I’ve never used it before. You can’t help but imagine the poem being observed by the deceased. You are even addressing it to them, asking the dead in, not to speak but to listen. And you let nothing go from your desk that wouldn’t meet their standard. It’s a kind of review you perhaps couldn’t previously have imagined, and then after, it is a review that can only be imagined by you.

  In the days that followed, whenever I got my coffee, I saw the picture of Tom next to my poem, and I thought each time about how you could wait too long to write. I was faltering with my second novel, but this stiffened my resolve. Tom had always had a knack for telling me the one thing I needed to hear, and in this way he told me this last part, again and again, almost daily, until the poem came down.

  4

  WHAT IS THE POINT? I have struggled with this question my student asked that morning after the election for as long as I’ve been a writer and a teacher.

  In a comic about that morning after the election, I would draw you a picture of me driving in my car, mountains in front of me and behind me, the black balloon of my question—How many times have I thought the world would end?—a thought balloon as long as the drive, and revealed on the next page to be as long as my life, a trip through all that has followed me since at least the fifth grade, when I first learned to fear death by neutron bomb, or that I would have to wear a special suit just to be outdoors as an adult because of damage to the ozone layer.

  I love summer. My worst nightmare is a world where I cannot enjoy it.

  In one panel is the time I learned that the empty factories of my childhood meant new factories had been built in other countries where labor was cheaper, and I understood those jobs would never return until the long argument owners were having with labor—an argument longer than my life—would end in Americans being paid almost nothing again.

  In another panel, near the middle, would be the trip I took in 2007, when I went to San Francisco to attend a week-long write
rs’ conference and took a taxi driven by a man who told me Republicans had a thirty-year plan to take back the wealth of the country for the rich, and that we were in the last decade of it. “Who told you this?” I asked, because it was what I had thought was happening. “Some professor,” he said as he dropped me off at the University of San Francisco. “I forget. He said it started with Reagan. But Reagan didn’t start it,” he said. “The people around him did.”

  I thanked him, tipped him, and went inside. I knew this was a moment like any in a newspaper column I’d read all too often, the pundit quoting the wisdom of his cabdriver to his audience. If I wrote about it, people would mock the trope, or they would say I sounded crazy. This is America, where you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.

  Somewhere near the end of the balloon is my realization, the morning after the election, that this is the last year of those thirty years the driver spoke of.

  THERE’S ANOTHER ALEXANDER CHEE in my mind, the one who I would be if I’d only had access to regular dental care throughout my career, down to the number of teeth in my mouth. I started inventing him on a visit to Canada in 2005 when I became unnerved by how healthy everyone looked there compared to the United States, and my sense of him grows every time I leave the country. I know I’ll have a shorter career for being American in this current age, and a shorter life also. And that is by my country’s design. It is the intention.