Digging deep to find oneself

Playful nonfiction by an experimental narrator

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Alexander Chee’s “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” doesn’t hand us any easy instructions.

Mr. Chee’s “how to,” a nonfiction essay collection, is more circuitous than most. There are no diagrams here, nor disembodied hands making elaborate meals in a minuteand-a-half. Instead, this book delights in contradiction, ambiguity, and slowness — it breaks the rules ofa “how to” in all the best ways.

This collection — a kind of autobiography in its own right — is a first for Mr. Chee, who is best known for his novels “Queen of the Night” and “Edinburgh.” The 16 essays, published in a rough chronology, span the author’s life: his quiet adolescent longings, his artsy undergraduate affectations, some formative years in AIDS-stricken San Francisco, and a bizarre caterwaiting gig in the household of Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, among other milestones.

In these essays, Mr. Chee is a lover and a gardener and the subletter of an apartment he cannot afford to own. He is a teacher and a student and a gay man of Korean descent.

The book is a constellation of Mr. Chee’s many selves, and its most satisfying moments can be found at their intersections. What makes this 280 page self-portrait so complex and whole is that these identities never stand alone, nor do they clash or compete. Instead, they brush up against each other like passengers on a crowded bus.

In a standout essay called “Girl,” a 20-something Mr. Chee admires himself in drag. It is 1990, he is a young activist living in San Francisco, and a night of Halloween revelry awaits: “I tilt my head back and carefully toss my hair over my right shoulder in the way I have seen my younger sister do. I realize I know one more thing about her than I did before — what it feels like to do this and why you would. It’s like your ownlittle thunderclap.”

This gesture is one of many small moments made revelatory by Mr. Chee’s subtle and empathetic storytelling. The narrating Alexander Chee — middle-aged and perched on a wildly successful literary career — greets his younger iterations with fondness and frankness. He captures the past with immediacy and couples it with cool, clear-eyed observation. This is the substance, and triumph, of autobiography.

As a narrator, Alexander Chee is incisive but capacious. Identities aren’t static, and he never treats them as such. Some of his most searing insights are about moments of becoming. In “Impostor,” Mr. Chee spends the summer in a luxurious apartment after publishing his first novel.“I knew I was not rich in a way that anyone else in the building would recognize, but I was writer rich,”he recalls.

Theplace was a 19th-floor one-bedroomwith a balcony view of the New York City skyline. “Every time I watched the skyline light up at night,” he writes, “it felt like countingmoney.”

Several essays, including “Girl” and “Impostor,” deal with the act of “passing” — passing for another race or gender or class — and the fraught thrills of slipping into a more comfortable identity, of allowing oneself to be mistaken for someone more privileged.

But Mr. Chee never lets himself off the hook. “I can’t chase after the power I felt that night,” he writes of the Halloween evening in drag, “the fleeting sense of finally belonging to the status quo, by making myself into something that looks like the something they want.”

“How to Write an Autobiographical Novel” wrestles with various ways a person can construct a self, the most difficult of which is the very act of writing. In three essays toward the end of the collection, Mr. Chee chronicles his experiences with childhood sexual abuse — and how those repressed memories became the basis for his renowned novel, “Edinburgh.”

But it’s not as simple as letting personal trauma fossilize in fiction. Fiction is not the artifact; it’s the archaeology. What Mr. Chee discovers is not a lost memory, but the self that it devoured.

“I had written a novel that, after it was published, let me practice saying what I remembered out loud for years until the day I could remember all of it,” he writes. “Until I could be the person who could stand it. The person who wrote that novel, he was waiting for me.”