How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee - annotations
exported 2025-08-29
The Writing Life
2025-07-16 13:50 | Page No.: 65
Never quote dialogue you can summarize.
2025-07-16 13:54 | Page No.: 69
We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes gray when you do that, she said. Don’t tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn’t angry, Annie said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.
2025-07-16 13:55 | Page No.: 70
One afternoon, at her direction, we brought in paper, scissors, and tape, and several drafts of an essay, one that we struggled with over many versions.
Now cut out only the best sentences, she said, and tape them on a blank page. And when you have that, write in around them, she said. Fill in what’s missing and make it reach for the best of what you’ve written thus far.
I watched as the sentences that didn’t matter fell away.
100 Things About Writing a Novel
2025-01-17 22:41 | Page No.: 179
A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, thelanguage demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you’ve never heard before.
The Autobiography of My Novel
2025-05-03 11:13 | Page No.: 269
Unspoken in all of this was that I didn’t feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity—any identity, really—was unreliable precisely because it was self-made.
2025-01-29 14:41 | Page No.: 275
I’d moved into the present tense as I had the idea of making the novel into something like Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood, a novel I loved, told in alternating points of view from the same person at different times in her life. An artist goes home for a retrospective of her work, and memories of the scalding love of her best friend from childhood return and overwhelm her. The novel uses past tense for the sections in the present, and present tense for the sections in the past, and between the two, the reader senses what the girl experienced that the adult does not remember.
2025-01-29 14:42 | Page No.: 276
The present is the verb tense of the casual story told in person, to a friend—So I’m at the park, and I see this woman I almost recognize . . .—a gesture many of us use. It is also the tense victims of trauma use to describe their own assaults.
2025-02-01 12:26 | Page No.: 277
IN AN INTERVIEW DEBORAH Eisenberg gave to the Iowa Review,she describes learning from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala that it is possible to write a kind of fake autobiography, and that idea—as I understood it—guided me next. I needed to make a “fake autobiography,” for someone like me but not me, giving him the situations of my life but not the events. He would be a little more unhinged, a little less afraid, a little more angry.
2025-02-01 12:27 | Page No.: 279
All of my stories lacked action or ended in inaction because that was what my imagination had always done to protect me from my own life, the child’s mistaken belief that if he stays still and silent, he cannot be seen, and this was wrong.
2025-02-01 12:28 | Page No.: 280
I wanted this novel to be about this thing no one wanted to think about, but to write it in such a way that no one would be able to put the book down, and in a way that would give it authority, and perhaps even longevity.
2025-01-16 22:16 | Page No.: 284
From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s job is not relating what actually happened, but rather the kind of thing that would happen—that is to say, whatis possible in terms of probability and necessity. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter ofusing verse or prose: you might put the works of Herodotus into verse and it would be a history in verse no less than in prose. The difference is that the one relates what actually happened, and the other the kinds of events that would happen.
For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths,history particular statements.
2025-01-16 22:17 | Page No.: 288
I made a world I knew, not the world I knew, and began again there.
2025-05-03 11:28 | Page No.: 292
I still didn’t know I had written it to do this, but then I did.
I wish I could show you the roomful of people who’ve told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be.
I still don’t know if I’d be in that room.
The Guardians
2025-08-29 11:18 | Page No.: 293
and I liked to stand with a scotch and a cigarette looking north on Third Avenue and imagine that I had made it.
2025-08-29 11:19 | Page No.: 294
and the ceilings and floors were warped and thus changed height from room to room, disorienting as I walked the apartment. I sometimes banged my head on a doorframe.
2025-08-29 11:20 | Page No.: 295
I was teaching stereoscopic narratives to my writing students that fall: the same story told from two or more points of view. I had used one in my first novel, but I employed the structure of Batman comics as my example, as I did not want to be the kind of professor who taught his own book. Batman stories offered basic and effective versions of this dual narrative. There is a mysterious crime, then Batman’s attempt to apprehend the criminal. Typically the criminal, at one point or another, captures Batman and tells him the entire story from his own point of view, and the crime is made knowable, the criminal also. During the monologue, Batman manages to escape and bring the criminal to justice, explaining his methods, and the reader then has the complete story.
2025-08-29 11:22 | Page No.: 298
and I had seen this expression on his face from the other side—this had happened to me when I was his age.
It takes one to know one.
2025-08-29 11:22 | Page No.: 299
I just knew then that I had become the man I ran from when I was having my own flashbacks. And so I was patient as he fought whatever this was inside him, even as I knew how my own relationships then had ended. I was in yet another stereoscopic narrative.
2025-08-29 11:22 | Page No.: 299
Based on my own experiences with flashbacks, I developed a theory that he could only kiss me in public places, because it made him feel safe to know he could leave if he needed to.
2025-07-16 09:20 | Page No.: 300
WE ARE NOT WHAT we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea.
2025-07-16 09:21 | Page No.: 300
There were moments before the memory’s return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. As if a copy of me had secretly replaced me. An android of me moving through the landscape, independent of the other me, exactly like me but not me.
2025-07-16 09:23 | Page No.: 303
A child’s anger. The child in me had wanted her to figure out what had happened. I had hoped to avoid the humiliation of having to tell her, wanting her instead to guess my thoughts. That adolescent wish that the mother knows your pain without your having to describe it. But children have to learn to say they are in pain. To name it. The naming even helps heal it.
2025-08-29 11:24 | Page No.: 304
and as I read through scenes describing how she had attempted suicide and then, in therapy afterward, raged at her therapist for not knowing she had attempted suicide, I wondered at the therapist’s reaction to the suicide attempt itself.
2025-08-29 11:25 | Page No.: 304
I received an email back, the letters in the tiniest possible font, smaller than she normally used, such that I thought, at first, it was some strange mistake, or even a hacking.
I never told her. I’ve never been in therapy for it, either.
My immediate thoughts: How could she not have told anyone? Did she not know how dangerous it was to just go around untreated? She could relapse at any moment. And then I remembered: most suicides hope to die without interference. Telling someone means allowing the person you told the chance to stop you.
2025-08-29 11:25 | Page No.: 305
All her life since then she had been waiting to see if someone would notice, and I had. And then another cold truth came to me out of those tiny letters.
I was almost exactly like her.
2025-05-02 10:00 | Page No.: 305
PRIOR TO THE MEMORY’s return, if you asked me, I would tell you there were things in my life that I couldn’t remember. I would allow you to think that they were like your own missingmemories, gaps made by pure human fallibility and impressionistic thinking. Associations that didn’t associate. And yet I recall feeling an empty confidence at those times, the hollow power of a lie.
2025-05-02 10:00 | Page No.: 306
My writing process is informed in general by my relationship to this—a process with a deep mistrust of myself.
2025-08-29 11:26 | Page No.: 307
They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn’t like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you. They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect themselves from being revealed as burned.
2025-08-29 11:26 | Page No.: 307
You imagine that the worst thing is that someone would know.
2025-05-02 10:01 | Page No.: 307
The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you. And it will—it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself. The worst thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay waste to your whole life by hiding.
2025-08-29 11:26 | Page No.: 308
I’m sorry, is what I would have wanted to have my replacement say in that documentary. Sorry I was so lonely as a child. Sorry that I was a child, with a child’s reasoning. Sorry I didn’t understand how this man could be punished, as I had only ever seen children punished.
2025-07-16 09:28 | Page No.: 308
Edinburgh is a palinode. The gods, offended by a speech, require the speaker to make another, its opposite.
2025-05-02 10:04 | Page No.: 312
My despair was the despair of realizing that this was just another trap, that there was perhaps no end of traps.
2025-08-29 11:28 | Page No.: 313
I was twelve when I put this memory away. The force exerting itself in my life was the power of pure childhood imagination, unmediated by any sense
2025-08-29 11:28 | Page No.: 314
of my own power to speak, to create understanding and compassion. Instead, there was in me a dream of fear, so powerful I made a doll of myself to stay in my place, and I ran away. The doll woke up, stretched, looked around, and believed it was me.
2025-05-02 10:05 | Page No.: 314
IMAGINE WALKING INTO YOUR apartment and finding someone ripping up a piece of paper. You put your hand on his arm and this person turns to face you. It is you.
2025-05-02 10:05 | Page No.: 314
But my recovered memory, for me, waslike receiving a telegram one morning and finding inside the answer to twenty-five years’ worth of mistakes, twenty-five years of confusion and pain, and watching as around me the day turned as black as night.
2025-05-02 10:06 | Page No.: 315
There was one more story I was inside of then, yet anotherstereograph. The one from the spring. The one in which I was someone who had not told his therapist the story he needed to tell.
2025-05-02 10:06 | Page No.: 315
But inside the self performing as someone who was fine was the self who was not, and the vision I’d had of my life, the one that had me wanting to scream, was a vision of how living this way, inside of this performance, had blighted my life. I felt like a tree struck by lightning a long time ago, burning secretly from the inside out, the bark still smooth to the end—the word FINE painted on it.
2025-05-02 10:07 | Page No.: 316
I had read self-help books to research the novel about sexual abuse, but I had not done the work, had not applied those books to myself as much as I had used them as a map to a character. Through it all I kept telling myself that nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me, nothing had happened to me. I was fine.
2025-08-29 11:30 | Page No.: 318
I told myself I was chasing pleasure after so much grief. That I was writing my new novel. But I was desperate to escape the slow creep of deadness inside, the paralysis I felt in the face of this memory and all that came with it.
2025-05-02 10:09 | Page No.: 320
We repeat something so that we can forget the pain of it. We set out to get it right instead, to fix what went wrong. But we can never fix the past, he said. We then only repeat it.
2025-08-29 11:30 | Page No.: 320
We can only break the future, came the thought.
There is something I should tell you, I said.
And there, on his office sofa, I remembered my student who had never told her therapist enough, and began at last to try to tell someone everything.
2025-08-29 11:31 | Page No.: 321
The therapist gave me an exercise. You can’t get rid of the guardians who’ve kept you safe until now, he said. You have to give them new jobs. The jobs they have, they’ve been doing since you were a child.
2025-05-02 10:10 | Page No.: 321
I had written a novel that, after it was published, let me practice saying what I remembered out loud for years until theday I could remember all of it. Until I could be the person whocould stand it. The person who wrote that novel, he was waiting for me.
How To Write an Autobiographical Novel
2025-07-16 13:30 | Page No.: 322
When you begin, you are like someone left in the woods with an ax and a clear memory of houses, deciding to build a house.
2025-07-16 13:30 | Page No.: 323
Soon you learn that you see it only when you do not try.
2025-07-16 13:31 | Page No.: 324
You don’t know this yet, but gods, even when you don’t believe in them, do not give something easily. Not even when the god is you.
You didn’t make this up, people say to you when finally you write it and give it to them to read.
I did, you say, but you feel as if you have dropped your disguise.
2025-01-17 22:37 | Page No.: 325
To do this, use the situations but not the events of your life.
Invent a character like you, but not you.
You, in the forest of yourself with the ax, building the house, sealing yourself within its walls.
You are the ghost of the house you build and never live in, this house you make of your life.
The space you occupy more like the space between the wall and the paint.
This also the difference between you and the one you haveinvented to be you.
2025-01-17 22:38 | Page No.: 326
This golem of the self, this house, now something anyone could visit and understand. Unlike you. That is what you hope for now.
This golem more or less careless than you, more or less selfish, more or less remorseful.
More or less you, but not you.
2025-07-16 13:41 | Page No.: 326
Or choose a name with the same music.