A memoir in essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel explores bestselling author Alexander Chee's education as a man, writer and activist – and how we form our identities in life and in art
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College. alexanderchee.net @alexanderchee
Alexander Chee sifted through tales from his past to present golden
insights into the way art can shape a life ... a singular and
sincere writer of both fiction and nonfiction
*TIME 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018*
Alexander Chee is one of the best living writers of today. If he’s
not already a household name, he needs to be ... Powerful, powerful
essays with powerful, powerful words
*Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald, on NBC’s Today*
Chee’s insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won,
honest and incredibly wise
*Curtis Sittenfeld, Guardian Summer Reads*
Urgent and insightful
*Viet Thanh Nguyen, Guardian Summer Reads*
Pulses with urgency ... Chee has written a moving and personal
tribute to impermanence, a wise and transgressive meditation on a
life lived both because of and in spite of America, a place where,
he writes, “you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing
changes”
*New York Times Book Review*
These essays feel like a life’s wisdom – its hurts, joys and
redemptions – salvaged from a great fire ... This book makes me
feel possible
*Ocean Vuong*
Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee's How to Write an
Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned my sharpened reviewer’s pencil
in favour of luxuriating in the words. Chee’s writing has a
mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths
... Chee is a very special artist; his writing is lyrical and
accessible, whimsical and sad, often all at the same time
*NPR*
Heartfelt, writerly essays ... powerful
*Spectator*
As profound as they are beautiful, Chee's essays impart wisdom from
a life fully lived, and speak to what it means to be a writer and
reader in contemporary times
*Buzzfeed*
It’s so good that I could fill my word count just with quotations
... Every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigour,
tact ... The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and
it uncovers. That’s the gift that writing has given Chee, and it’s
the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers
*Boston Globe*
A knowing and luminous self-portrait
*O, the Oprah Magazine*
There is indeed an art to the personal essay, and he is a master
artist
*Esquire*
Unique and powerful, insistently itself
*R.O. Kwon, Electric Literature*
[A] trailblazing collection
*Washington Post*
Profound and resonant ... A nimble study in radical self-invention
... The revelations that follow crackle with the same glowing,
essential truths
*Wired*
Rarely does a book of essays come along so affecting, so brave and
bluntly honest, and so raw and poetic. I quit underlining my
favourite aphoristic lines by the time I reached that third essay:
it was useless to try to pick individual diamonds from a whole pile
of them
*Interview Magazine*
I'm astonished by the wisdom of these essays, and how beautiful
they are. A riveting account of activism and artistry, as well as a
profound exploration of the intersections of identities and
experiences that build up this novelist's composite eye. Alexander
Chee is brilliant and brave in equal measure, and has written an
essential book about how to survive as an artist in America
today
*Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You*
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is a rare hybrid of a book:
an act of poetry, a gift of entertainment, and a primer for life.
Alexander Chee is one of our most important writers and we should
listen to every damn thing he has to say
*Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown Up*
Alexander Chee asks one of the great coming of age questions here:
Isn’t beauty strong? His welter of answers yields a really moving
(and sometimes devastating) writing memoir of being young, of being
someone and not entirely knowing it yet – all the while being so
poetically receptive to the fragrant and devastating strains of
beauty and beauty’s harsh wisdom that wind up moving and shaping a
life. It's a strangely romantic and practical book. It holds a
skull lightly
*Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls*
An absolute gift of a book for writers everywhere. Every single
essay is a pearl
*Chicago Review of Books*
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