Cheryl's Reviews > How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"The writing felt both like an autonomic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others."

This book of essays, which now includes pink and yellow highlights for easy referencing, has left quite a few indelible impressions:

1. I've made a note to look more closely at stereoscopic narratives... (you'll have to read to understand)

2. After I turned the last page, I ordered Cat's Eye and Edinburgh.

3. I reworked my crumpled plan for that little idea of a small community collective for readers and writers (I created and ran a similar one for entrepreneurs for 7 years).

4. I now understand how memory, as relates to post-trauma, can be explained effectively.

5. I felt encouraged to shut myself in my hotel room after a few days of incessant work travel, ignored the taxing post-reception dinners where I just feel out of place, and simply scribbled away.

6. I went to bed with a smile frozen on my face the next morning.

7. I now see how ethnic and cultural identity crisis, although different, can cause similar pain and that such pain has similar consequences and that worldwide such suffering happens in silence until occasionally, well, occasionally books like these come about and a reader understands that she is not alone.

8. I have now seen Annie Dillard from a unique angle and will smile when I remember "too many gerunds together on the page makes for tinnitus."

9. I love that June Jordan and Joan Didion are also two of Alexander Chee's favorite essayists.

10. I know this with certainty: Activism can be strangely beautiful artistry.