How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  I have been to convenience stores where I see people working with untreated injuries, and when I leave, I get panhandled in the parking lot by someone in a chain-store uniform who is unable to afford the gas to get home on the last day before payday—someone with two jobs, three jobs. Until recently, I struggled to get by, and yet I am in the top twenty percent of earners in my country. I am currently saving up for dental implants—money I could as easily use for a down payment on a house. But I’m not entirely sure I’ll see the end of a mortgage, or that any of us will.

  Scientists around the world were terrified before the election about our chances for long-term survival on this planet. The widespread death of coral in the Great Barrier Reef—called coral bleaching, as if the coral were not dead, just blond—is something these scientists had feared but they’d believed they would not live to see happen. Many of them wept. Climate change denial is the product of an ExxonMobil campaign to prolong the period of its profits as long as possible—the corporation was caught spending millions of dollars to deny its existence, instead of openly working to create energy solutions we could all survive. Exxon knew climate change was real all along, has known for thirty years or more. Conservatism’s oldest con is getting a voter to yell “thief” at someone the thief chooses, the thief they voted for. And now we are in the final phase.

  It’s a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

  WRITING WORKSHOPS INEVITABLY CIRCLE around to conversations about publishing, and I usually allow it at the end of a class. This way I can teach my students the ordinariness of the profession as well as the radical possibilities in their work first. And since sometimes, maybe every time, the most radical thing to do with radical work is to treat it as ordinary, I make sure to educate students on the procedures for submitting work to magazines, journals, agents, and publishers. I try to pass along everything I know about writing and publishing, and to avoid injuring their excitement for it.

  There are the stories I tell the class. The stories I don’t tell are about being paid last, after even the power bill, though your book is the one under the lights. How your friends will think you’re rich, and your family will think you’ve betrayed them, even if you didn’t write about them. Reviewers will misunderstand your book and it will cost you everything and no one but you will care. Or they will misunderstand it and it will still sell thousands of copies and no one but you will care.

  To write and finish my first novel had taken seven years and three jobs, plus a fourth, the actual writing of the book. Sometimes I worked on it on the F train from Brooklyn, going into the city for a shift at the steakhouse where I waited tables. Sometimes I wrote it while I waited for my section to be seated. One day I gave up on it, in pain from sitting wrong for hours at a time. I won’t continue, I decided, until I have a typing table at the right height. And then I left my apartment and within an hour found one at a yard sale, as if the gods were mocking me.

  Here is your table, they seemed to say. The tag read $3, but what I read in that price, the table sitting there right in my way, was Get back to work.

  The feeling I had when the novel finally came out was not initially one of exultant enthusiasm. The feeling was You want me to do this again?

  I wasn’t just tired. I also needed money, and more would be forthcoming if I could write. But I couldn’t seem to write then. I had a novel I gave up on every Friday and began again every Monday, like a bad relationship. It was something beautiful I’d fallen in love with years ago and then talked myself out of, and then let myself back into, slowly. I had started another novel as well, but I didn’t feel smart enough to write that one yet. And the urgency of needing the money the writing could provide led to me shouting quietly, in my head, at anything I was actually able to get down. For failing myself.

  One day in the fall of 2003, I had gone to Wesleyan a little earlier for a ritual I wasn’t proud of, in which I would go to the comptroller’s office and request an advance on my check. It was a futile exercise, really, a way of delaying the day of the month when I would be out of money. My publisher had gone into bankruptcy owing me what then amounted to a year’s pay, and then they had sold foreign rights to my first novel, and I would never see that money because of the way bankruptcy court works. Afterward, as I headed to class, instead of going in, I stopped in my office to collect myself, because I had the urge to go in and tell my students to stop now. Don’t do it, it isn’t worth it, there’s nothing here for you.

  I knew it wasn’t true. I didn’t believe it. And yet I was tempted. But none of this would have reached those responsible. They didn’t need to hear about the failures of a system. They needed to hear about how to deal when the system fails.

  I waited alone in my office, watching the time in the lower right corner of my computer screen, until I felt I could teach from that. And then I stood and went in.

  What is the point? I was asking myself that day. The problem can be not just who is listening, but who is not listening. Who will never listen. The point of writing in the face of the problem was the point of samizdat, readers and writers meeting secretly all across the Soviet Union to share forbidden books, either written there or smuggled into the country. The point is in the widow of Osip Mandelstam memorizing her husband’s poetry while in the camps with him in the Soviet Union, determined that his poems make it to readers. The point of it is in the possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination’s limits. Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can’t imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn’t matter. It isn’t. Much the way you don’t know what a writer will go on to write, you don’t know what a reader, having read you, will do.

  ONLY IN AMERICA DO we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or to do anything of significance. I was already tired of hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time. By the time I found that Auden quote—“poetry makes nothing happen”—I was more than ready to believe what I thought he was saying. But books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic. My mother’s most common childhood memory of me is of standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice on the page. I didn’t really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else. And in order to do that, I had to commit the chaos inside of me to an intricate order, an articulate complexity.

  To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer’s eye there, looking through to me.

  If you don’t know what I mean, what I mean is this: when I speak of walking through a snowstorm, you remember a night from your childhood full of snow, or from last winter, say, driving home at night, surprised by a storm. When I speak of my dead friends and poetry, you may remember your own dead friends, or if none of your friends are dead, you may imagine how it might feel to have them die. You may think of your poems, or poems you’ve seen or heard. You may remember you don’t like poetry.
r />   Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.

  All my life I’ve been told this isn’t important, that it doesn’t matter, that it could never matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it’s the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.

  I BEGAN THIS ESSAY as an email I wrote to my students during that first weekend of the war in Iraq. I had felt a sudden, intense protectiveness of them. I didn’t want my students to go into the draft, rumored then to be a possibility, and I was even more afraid of people like the secretary of defense. Destroying art is practice for destroying people.

  I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew then and I know now that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, so easily changed.

  I wrote to them that weekend and told them that art endures past governments, countries, and emperors, and their would-be replacements. That art—even, or perhaps especially, art that is dedicated somehow to tenderness, dedicated as a lover who would offer something to her beloved in the last nights they’ll share before she leaves this life forever—is not weak. It is strength. I asked them to disregard the cultural war against the arts that has lasted most of their lives, the movement to discredit the arts and culture in American public life as being decorative interruptions of more serious affairs, unworthy of funding, or even of teachers. I told them that I can’t recall the emperors of China as well as I can Mencius, who counseled them, and whose stories of them, shared in his poetry of these rulers and their problems, describe them for me almost entirely. And the paradox of how a novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t.

  The email I sent was not the only act, though; it was just a beginning. It was when I turned my back on the idea that teaching writing means only teaching how to make sentences or stories. I needed to teach writing students to hold on—to themselves, to what matters to them, to the present, the past, the future. And to the country. And to do so with what they write. We won’t know when the world will end. If it ever does, we will be better served when it does by having done this work we can do.

  I have new lessons in not stopping, after “the election.” If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love, and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there? I tell myself I can’t imagine a story that can set them free, these people who hate me, but I am writing precisely because one did that for me. So I always remember that, and I know to write even for them.

  I am, it should be said, someone who did lose his faith. I may in fact be pusillanimous, even as a condition of my faith in myself, and at times I despair. I do not write as much as I should. I do not always think that when I die I will have the chance to see my dead again. But for now, I live and work and I feel them watching me.

  And so I leave this here now, for them. And for you.

  Acknowledgments

  I will begin by thanking my husband, Dustin Schell, who regularly makes the value of my life and my work visible to me in ways large and small, and whose love is the center of my world.

  Thank you to my agent, Jin Auh, for her friendship and fearless advocacy all these years, and to her associate, Jessica Friedman, and the entire team at the Wylie Agency, who protect me and my work so well. Thank you to my editor, Naomi Gibbs, for her thoughtful and demanding editorial acumen, and to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their hard work on my books. After fighting so hard for it, being in print is everything to me.

  My thanks to my teachers in the writing of essays, Annie Dillard and Clarke Blaise. My thanks to the editors of the published essays here: Edmund White; Elizabeth Benedict; Rosecrans Baldwin and the entire Morning News family; Hillary Brenhouse, Dan Sheehan, and Michael Archer at Guernica; Chad Harbach and n+1; Jesse Pearson, at Apology; Aaron Gilbreath, Mike Dang, Michelle Legro, and Sari Botton, at Longreads; Mark Armstrong, at Automattic; Yuka Igarishi and Mensah Demary, at Catapult; Isaac Fitzgerald, Saeed Jones, Karolina Waclaviak, and Jarry Lee, at BuzzFeed. Your collective efforts have helped make me the essayist I am, and I’m very grateful.

  Friends who helped especially: Garnette Cadogan, John Freeman, Melanie Fallon, Jami Attenberg, Keiko Lane, Sandi Hammonds, Maud Newton, Gerard Koskovich, and Joe Osmundson—thank you for keeping faith with me and this work. And my thanks to my writing group, The Resistance: Mira Jacob, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Luis Jaramillo, Brittany Allen, Julia Phillips, Tennessee Jones, and Bill Cheng.

  THIS COLLECTION BEGAN IN part thanks to an invitation from Lis Harris to read in the Columbia University Nonfiction Program’s series in the fall of 2014. I collected my published essays to send to her students, and I am so grateful to her for that prod. Some of the anecdotes central to my history here may have been described by me on other occasions, in interviews or in other essays, and so I reserve the right to effectively repeat those anecdotes, or plagiarize myself. The names and identifying details of some of the living people described here have been changed to protect their identities.

  The following essays originally appeared in other publications. All have been edited and revised for this collection. In particular, “The Curse,” initially published as “Playing Mexican,” in the New School’s literary magazine Lit, and “After Peter,” first published in Loss Within Loss, edited by Edmund White (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), are greatly revised from their original versions. “The Querent” was previously published at the Morning News. “The Writing Life” first appeared in the anthology Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, and was reprinted at the Morning News. “My Parade” first appeared in the n+1 anthology MFA vs NYC, and was reprinted by BuzzFeed Books;“Girl” was first published in Guernica and was reprinted in The Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen. “Mr. and Mrs. B” was first published in Apology and was reprinted online at Longreads. “Impostor” was first published at Catapult. “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” first appeared at BuzzFeed. “The Autobiography of My Novel” was first published in the Sewanee Review.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find more books by Alexander Chee.

  About the Author

  Alexander Chee is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at the Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

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