Dan's Reviews > How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

A little backstory here so it's (hopefully) clear I wasn't predisposed to dislike this book: I knew nothing about the author except that his novels had been well-received and sounded interesting. I picked up "How to Write..." based on the strength of the first few pages. After finishing, I still believe the first essay is the strongest of the book. In it, Chee describes the summer he spent in Mexico as part of an exchange program with other high school students from Maine. The writing in this particular essay is precise and evocative. I was instantly drawn in by the author's descriptions of the house where he's living and the family he's staying with. The locker room scene he depicts is particularly vivid. Unfortunately the essay seemed to lose steam toward the end, but I couldn't quite figure out why. I liked the theme Chee wove through the book of his struggle to become someone else. In that first essay, he eventually tries (and succeeds) at passing as a native Mexican. In another essay he describes the thrill of dressing in drag and assuming a different identity, and a third essay describes what it's like to sublet a chic NYC apartment and pretend at great wealth. Identity is key here. Chee is gay and half-Korean, so he's dealt with racism and bigotry in a very real way. I'm straight, but very liberal, so I was fine with the author's politics and orientation. In fact, he's captivating when he talks about the anti-AIDS protests he participated in and the friends he lost to the disease. That's something I know little about, so I was eager to learn more. What ultimately irked me about the book? It started in that first essay with the author's wager he could fool some of his host family's friends into thinking he was Mexican. He won the bet, couching this first essay in the victory of a new identity, yet beneath that is his need to point out he was the only one of his classmates to become fluent in Spanish over the course of the summer. A small thing at first, not even noticeable until I started seeing other little boasts threaded throughout. This isn't really "How to Write an Autobiographical Novel" but rather "How to Convince Everyone of Your Bona Fides as a Writer." The book is one long CV, one long humblebrag. I was great at learning Spanish. I got my MFA at Iowa even though a lot of other people didn't. I sold my first book when I was really young. I drove a cool sports car. I attended a hip liberal arts school. I won writing fellowships. I studied with famous writers. I spoke at Yale. There was so much of this that it became a distraction for me and ultimately made me dismissive of what was intended as a heartfelt book. Chee says something true, if a bit obvious, when he points out that money for a writer equals time, so I can't really fault him for profiting from the individual essays and then publishing them in book form to make more money from them. The problem is that some of the essays overlap, leading to repetition, while others just seem extraneous. This is especially true of the essay in the middle of the book about rose gardening. Chee strained to make his descriptions of the roses lyrical, but it didn't really save the piece. To his credit, Chee knows how to structure a book, placing his strongest essay upfront and burying his weakest essays in the center. Another essay in this section seems like an elaborate way for Chee to disclose he lived for awhile in the same building as Chloe Sevigny. And we care why? At the same time he's bragging about not saying hi to Sevigny in the elevator or helping some kids in a coffee shop after the towers fell to play up his NYC cred (I know, way cynical of me), he's dropping tantalizing hints about what the book could've been. His dad was a military lifer of Korean descent who died prematurely. Chee's mom was from Maine. The family lived on Guam at one point. Yet none of this is brought to the fore. Instead we get these odd pieces about hearty rose varieties and a defense of the writing program at Iowa and the aforementioned Sevigny encounters. And then the book kind of crumbles into writerly aphorisms, things that sound great but ultimately don't really mean much. I kept thinking of that other Maine writer, Stephen King, whose book on writing was so strikingly clear. I wish there would've been less obfuscation here, less self-praise, and more memoir.