How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

Alexander Chee’s book of essays

For a long time I got into the habit of writing down why I put a book on my TO READ list. It got to the point where a book was finally available on my library holds list after many weeks, and I could not for the life of me remember why I put it there. Welcome to middle age! I don’t know why I stopped this habit (I probably forgot — see previous sentence), but it looks like it’s time to start again for a couple of reasons. First, I get recommendations from all over thanks to Substack and Instagram, and I never seem to learn that some people just don’t have the same taste in reading as I do (looking at you Reese’s Book Club). They make a book sound great, and then I read it and am underwhelmed. But more importantly, sometimes I read a book I love, and I want to search out more from the person who shared that recommendation, and I draw a blank. So if you recommended Alexander Chee’s 2018 collection of essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, please make yourself known, because I want to thank you! I’m thinking it was Roxanne Gay, maybe? Think she’ll have time to reach out? FYI — Roxanne has great taste in books, and she shares reviews on Goodreads.

I’d say it doesn’t matter, but my menopause brain begs to differ.

Chee’s book of essays is really wonderful — interesting, informative, moving, thought-provoking. I think the blurb on Amazon summed it up well:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing — Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley — the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.

The William F. Buckley story was particularly interesting, but all the essays are great. I read it cover to cover, and I highly recommend it.

And make sure you write down who told you to read it.