HOW TO WRITE AN
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
By Alexander Chee
Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
alexanderchee.net
Alexander Chee, a one-time writing teacher at Amherst College, took more than a dozen years to finish his most recent novel, 2015’s “Queen of the Night,” but he did plenty of other writing during that period, including when he was at Amherst, from 2006 to 2010.
Some of that work is part of Chee’s newest book, “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel,” a collection of essays on a wide range of subjects — his upbringing as a half Korean/half American, his father’s death, Donald Trump’s election to president, the AIDS crisis, his progress from student to writer — that collectively make for a loose memoir that offers an overall look at what it means to try to make a life as an artist.
The book, Chee’s first collection of nonfiction, has received good reviews so far; Publishers Weekly ranked it a “Top 10” collection of new essay writing. Chee, today a professor of English at Dartmouth College, is also the author of the 2001 novel “Edinburgh,” a coming-of-age tale that won a number of awards.
“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” includes previously published work as well as new essays, such as “Inheritance,” in which Chee reflects on his father’s untimely death at age 43. He received an inheritance at age 18 from a trust formed from his father’s money, since his father had not made out a will before he died and the state of Maine, where the family lived, divided the money between Chee, his two siblings and their mother.
One of the first things he did, Chee writes, was buy a fancy car, a black Alfa Romeo, because “My father had loved fast cars and expensive ones, both, and so I bought what I thought he’d want for me.” Nine years later, the car died and Chee’s trust was exhausted, leaving him at first feeling like he was shedding a burden of sorts.
“And yet spending the last of it was not just like failing my father,” he writes. “It was like losing him again.”
And in “On Becoming an American Writer,” he wrestles with a question many writers have struggled with: Does writing matter, given calamitous events like 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, or the continued decline in the quality of life for many Americans?
“Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or do anything of significance,” he writes. “I was already tired of hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword … Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time.”
But ultimately, he concludes, writing is important: Writers cannot only transport readers to another time and place but speak truth to power.
“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.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.