How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, his adult reckoning with childhood sexual trauma, the jobs that supported him as he wrote his debut, Edinburgh (from Tarot-reading to bookselling to cater-waiting for William F. Buckley), and the election of Donald Trump.

By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel was the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees’ Award; finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography; named a Best Book by: TIME, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, The Paris Review, Mother Jones,The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine,The Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books

Website: alexanderchee.net