I got off to a slow start with Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, until I found some passages that almost made my heart stop. Most of my college English Lit classes bored me, so it was nice to experience a stellar English professor through his collection of sixteen essays, akin to a memoir. Chee also freelances for publications, including the Los Angeles Times.
“…Chee probes the emotional and psychological events that led him to his novel,” Fergus McIntosh, “How Fiction Helped Alexander Chee Face Reality,” New Yorker, May 9, 2018.
Chee succinctly expresses the impracticality of the creative drive, “I had money earned on writing that I would spend on more time to write….”
This quote reminds me of the question uttered by someone I was dating a few years back. He watched a clip of me performing stand-up comedy and genuinely laughed, but then asked, “Are you getting paid for that?”
After I replied, his follow-up was a semi-shocked, “How much?”
As if every moment away from him should be billable. He definitely did not understand the creative drive.
“Writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about,” says Chee.
Sometimes empathy hurts. Writing is a way to channel the pain and potentially influence those in a position to make changes.
Chee discusses the process of creating his novel and its intricate structure in “The Autobiography of My Novel” in Spring 2018 The Sewanee Review.
Here are two more of my favorite quotes from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel:
p. 221 “In 2004, a memory returned to me after twenty-five years. And with the memory’s return, I understood that I had lived for a long time in a sort of intricate disguise.
p. 226. “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. Every now and then, I could see the distance between us. Three times, in particular, this other self had appeared before me.”
In Dream Walking my novel that was based on my young adult experiences, the character Georgia is not exactly me.
In my memoir/information guide Intact: Untangle the Web of Bipolar Depression, Addiction, and Trauma, I tried to give a better representation of how trauma, innate traits, addiction, and brains can interact. #storytelling #novels #writing