Years ago, Alexander Chee was attending a Wall Street book-club discussion of “Edinburgh,” his début novel, when “an otherwise nice white guy” asked him whether he had been a victim of sexual abuse. “Edinburgh,” which was published in 2001, follows Fee, a Korean-American from Maine, as he navigates the aftermath of sexual abuse in his small-town boys choir. The novel is highly autobiographical. Yes, Chee said, he had been sexually abused. The man seemed annoyed. “Why didn’t you just write about your experience?” Chee recalls him asking. “Why isn’t it a memoir?”
That question is at the heart of Chee’s new essay collection, “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.” Ironically, the sixteen essays, which follow a rough chronology, together form something of a memoir, in which Chee probes the emotional and psychological events that led him to his novel. He doesn’t entirely shirk the kind of practical advice the title suggests—in one essay, “The Writing Life,” Chee relays various axioms of Annie Dillard, whose literary-nonfiction class he took at Wesleyan (“Bad verb choices mean adverbs,” “Don’t ever use the word ‘soul’ ”), and elsewhere he shares tips about keeping rent low and employment flexible. For the most part, though, Chee’s guidance is implicit in the stories he tells. As they unfurl, they reveal a kind of leitmotif of Chee’s adolescence and early adulthood. Again and again, he invents a new, fictional version of himself, only to be banished back to his own singular existence. The return to reality stings, but it is accompanied, each time, by a revelation.
The opening essay, called “The Curse,” establishes the pattern. In it, Chee recalls a summer that he spent living with a wealthy family in Mexico, on a language-exchange program, when he was fifteen. In the daytime, he watches television with the housekeeper and writes short stories. At night, he goes with his handsome exchange partner, Miguel Ángel, to the town dump, where they drink with the local kids. These outings provide an erotic, if one-sided, charge for Chee, who already knows that he’s gay. As Chee’s Spanish gradually crosses into fluency, he gains the equally thrilling ability to “pass” as Mexican: in Mexico, unlike in Maine, to be mixed-race is not to be foreign. Chee re-creates himself as Alejandro from Tijuana, a boy “like me but more at ease in the world.” Then the summer ends, the fiction slips, and he returns to his family. “I would never have this life,” Chee writes. “No life but the one I had. America now the exile of me.”
As an adult, Chee continues to test the parameters of his identity. In “Girl,” he has graduated from Wesleyan and moved to San Francisco, where he works in a queer bookshop and protests government inaction in the face of the AIDS crisis. It’s the late eighties. On Halloween, wearing lipstick and eyeliner and a shoulder-length blond wig, he realizes that he is “not just in drag as a girl, but as a white girl.” Again, he passes, drawing catcalls from visiting straight men as he walks through the Castro. It gives him a rush of power as strong and as violent as cocaine. And, again, borrowing someone else’s life, just for a moment, lets him see himself more clearly, and with greater generosity. Afterward, when he looks in the mirror, the face he sees is “not half this or half that, it is all something else.”
“Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask,” Chee writes. Each of these excursions into a kind of lived fiction allowed Chee to confront and accept something he had, at least in part, rejected about himself: his mixed heritage, his queerness. This is an idea that Chee explored almost obsessively in his second novel, “The Queen of the Night,” which was set, non-autobiographically, in nineteenth-century France. Over more than five hundred and fifty pages, the protagonist, Lilliet Berne, an opera singer with a terrible past, changes her name and nationality, shuttles through at least five distinct identities, and ultimately bows out of a production of Verdi’s “I Masnadieri” amid rumors that she is cursed to become whatever she enacts onstage. (Her character in the Verdi opera, Amalia, is stabbed before the final curtain.) Lilliet’s view of herself is occluded, but she gains new insight with each role and reinvention. After she takes on her final character, in an opera based on her own life, she is, finally, able to return home. She’s a striking analogue for Chee, though he seems luckier than she: because he deals in words rather than song, he was able to write his own story.
In the early nineties, Chee began to assemble fragments, scribbled notes, and poems, and to feel his way toward the larger whole that would become “Edinburgh.” He wrote in the present tense—“the tense victims of trauma use,” he notes—and this acted on him like “self-hypnosis,” allowing feelings that had been hidden to pour out. With every sentence, he was building a new, fictional identity, onto which he could transcribe his most painful memories. It was as though he were creating a mask, and then choosing not to wear it.
Early in the novel, Fee joins a choir. He finds fellowship among the choristers, and joy in the music: “My voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when I opened my mouth and I let the voice out.” He is, in equal parts, fascinated and confused by his heritage—Korean on his father’s side, Scottish-Irish on his mother’s. He loves stories and opera, and excels in high school, after which he goes on to Wesleyan, where he wears black and smokes cigarettes, all the while tailed by the psychological aftershocks of abuse. In all of this, Fee matches his creator.
Like Fee, Chee is tormented by having been manipulated into keeping his attacker’s secret. In an essay called “The Guardians,” near the end of the new collection, Chee writes about being taken on a small group camping trip by his choir director. In advance, innocent of what awaits, the pubescent Chee wakes from a dream in which he kisses his crush, a fellow-chorister who is also coming on the trip. For the first time, he realizes that he is gay. He believes that the trip will be “a dream come true.” The kiss happens, but under the gaze, and at the encouragement of, the director; all it does is “make my mouth a grave,” Chee writes. Overtaken by despair and shame, he is unable to face that what he has wanted so sincerely has been so profoundly corrupted. He retreats. “I made a doll of myself to stay in my place, and I ran away. The doll woke up, stretched, looked around, and believed it was me.”
At Wesleyan, Dillard told Chee that “writing about the past was like submerging yourself in a diving bell . . . You could get the bends.” In an essay titled “The Autobiography of My Novel,” he recalls that, in writing “Edinburgh,” he was looking for “pity and fear and grand action. And purification.” For Chee, the perversion of his innocent desire was an object of anguish so painful that, for years, he was unable to even think of it. Instead, he got on with his life, until he realized that the repression that had allowed him to function was also paralyzing him.
Chee characterizes his novel as a “ ‘fake autobiography,’ for someone like me but not me.” In “Edinburgh,” the fictional choir director, “Big Eric,” is convicted of twelve counts of child abuse, which is in line with what actually happened. (The real-life perpetrator had previously avoided conviction in a similar case, in a different state.) Examining the unspeakable allowed Chee to exorcise it—after “Edinburgh” was published, he finally entered therapy.
But why didn’t he just write a memoir? As in “Girl” and “The Curse,” Chee needed to escape himself in order to see through his shame, and to return healed. Repression, the recovery of memory, and the reliving of the emotions that memory elicits were at once the purpose of “Edinburgh” and its métier. “The things I saw in my life, learned things, didn’t fit back into the boxes of my life,” Chee writes. But they did fit into a novel. Through fiction, Chee was able to bring himself back to the real world.
At Chee’s request, this post has been edited to remove identifying details of his abuser.
