How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is brilliant on a sentence level, but it didn’t grab me on the macro level. No question Alexander Chee is a great writer, and maybe if I’d read his fiction I would feel differently, but a lot of this just didn’t capture my attention. At least that’s what I thought immediately after reading it.

It’s a collection of essays, mostly memoir. Chee is gay, half white and half Korean, which gives him a unique perspective on America. He’s had a lifetime of experiences that couldn’t be more different than my small-town-white-boy upbringing. His story is tragic, inspirational, angering and frequently relatable.

In a standout piece called “Girl”, Chee recounts his first time in drag. It’s full of great insights into the appeal of the scene and the culture around it. This part has stuck with me since I read it:

My friends in San Francisco at this time, we all call each other “girl,” except for the ones who think they are too butch for such nellying, though we call them “girl” maybe most of all. My women friends call each other “girl” too, and they say it sometimes like they are a little surprised at how much they like it. This, for me, began in meetings for ACT UP and Queer Nation, a little word that moved in on us all back then. When we say it, the word is like a stone we pass one to the other: the stone thrown at all of us. And the more we catch it and pass it, it seems the less it can hurt us, the more we know who our new family is now. Who knows us, and who doesn’t. It is something like a bullet turned into something like a badge of pride.

There’s lots of this in the book. Sharp insights into the minds and motivations of others, universal moments considered in a unique way that made me think about my own past. In one piece about finding success as a writer after a long stretch of struggle, he writes:

Surely it will be easier now, I told myself. Surely this is what it means to have made it. I think many writers pass through this. But believing trouble is gone forever is the beginning of a special kind of trouble.

Overall though, these essays would have been better read slowly than in a single volume. Chee’s writing is gentle and immersive, but it meanders, and I kept disengaging. The deeper I got, the more it felt like a task to start a new piece. The fault is mine though. After a couple of days, as I think back on the essays, I feel like I owe them another chance. They’ve lingered in my memory and come back to me in bits and pieces, and I think I’m selling them a little short.

This is an excellent collection of writing — just remember to savour it, and don’t come at it too fast.

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