How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Curse

  The Querent

  The Writing Life

  1989

  Girl

  After Peter

  My Parade

  Mr. and Mrs. B

  100 Things About Writing a Novel

  The Rosary

  Inheritance

  Imposter

  The Autobiography of My Novel

  The Guardians

  How To Write an Autobiographical Novel

  On Becoming an American Writer

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from Alexander Chee

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2018 by Alexander Chee

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-76452-2

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  Front and inside cover photographs courtesy of the author

  Author photograph © M. Sharkey

  eISBN 978-1-328-76441-6

  v1.0318

  To my mother and father, who taught me how to fight

  The Curse

  I SPENT THE SUMMER I turned fifteen on an exchange program in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the capital of the state of Chiapas, in Mexico, some three hundred miles north of the Guatemalan border. My host family was named Gutiérrez, and I never asked them if the town took its name from their forebears, but if it did, they wore their fame lightly, though they were a powerful and prosperous family. The father, Fernando, had been a stevedore, of the kind who worked for him now, and the mother, Cela (pronounced Che-la), was a dance teacher. They lived like people who felt lucky to be alive, and I loved them right away.

  Their son, Miguel Ángel, had lived the previous year with me and my family in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He had told his parents stories of me, and so they greeted me like a child they’d always known but never met. They had a handsome modern house of gleaming wood, glass, and stucco, surrounded by high walls topped with barbed wire and trees with enormous crowns, their leaves arrayed in stars, that I would learn were mangoes.

  The first night, the family told me over a cheerful and friendly dinner that they were not going to speak to me in English for the rest of the summer, no matter how confusing it was. And that this was to teach me to speak Spanish. I laughed as I agreed, in Spanish, to their terms, intimidated but sure of my purpose and already wanting to please them.

  That night, as I lay awake trying to sleep, I heard the knock of ripe mangoes falling from the trees that circled the house and ran up and down the street. The noise ranged, depending on the ripeness, from the plop of a tennis ball to a pulpy sort of splash to the occasional smash when one of them would crash through a car windshield.

  We need to cut that tree down, my host mother said the next morning. She would say it whenever this happened, but they never did. It was as if they accepted the broken windshields as the price of the mangoes, which we ate as fast as we could. They had their gardener collect the fruit instead, and replaced the windshields as if they were changing a tablecloth. And that would be among the first of my object lessons in the ways of the very rich.

  Years later, and only when I learned of the deep poverty in Chiapas—the reason they had those walls topped with barbed wire—did I think to question whether it was really just mangoes breaking their windshields—if mango season lasted as long as a summer.

  I WAS ONE OF twelve students in Chiapas from my high school that summer, on what now seems like an odd program: we lived there with the Mexican students who lived with us during the year, but unlike them, we did not attend any classes. The summer itself was supposed to be a class. If my host family had not made me promise never to speak English, I don’t know what I would have learned. Our teacher came with us, as a chaperone, but he did not teach us. Whatever else he did there, he also accompanied us on intermittent group field trips to explore the mostly well-trodden ruins and to shop in places like the nearby San Cristóbal de las Casas, formerly the capital of Mexico, a quiet, sun-struck city, cheated out of the prosperity of being the capital. These trips were set apart for me by stretches of nameless, numberless days spent wandering the empty, luxurious house while the Gutiérrezes were either at school or at work. I was fascinated by my host father’s many toupees, which were kept on mannequin heads in his bedroom dressing room, and the life they suggested, entirely alien, of hair that was public and hair that was private.

  It was just one detail of many that I eagerly collected that summer, and if it seems I was snooping, I was. I was lost in the books I had brought with me, the Dune novels by Frank Herbert—the story of a young boy without playmates, suspected of being a messianic figure, and undergoing training in the ways of the Bene Gesserit, a secretive society of women with extraordinary powers, born in part through their obsessive observation of detail. The boy was the latest iteration of a series of heroes like this for me—Encyclopedia Brown, Sherlock Holmes, Batman—who went from being ordinary people to heroes through their ability to perceive the things others missed. I wanted to see if I too could obtain these powers through observation.

  And when I wasn’t reading those novels, I wrote my own stories, stories no one has seen to this day, about mutants with psychic powers who were running from a government that, of course, hoped to control them. X-Men fan fiction, essentially, before I knew what it was.

  It was my greatest dream to live out this kind of story, of power gained through either inborn abilities or persistence, and though I couldn’t have said this at the time, this dream coming true would have meant all of my struggles were worth it.

  The closest thing I had to a routine that summer was my time spent sitting with the cook, Panchita, in front of the kitchen television, chomping on the fried tortillas she served me, spread with some sort of light, fresh tomato sauce and sprinkled with white cheese. Together we watched El Maleficio, a telenovela about a wealthy family of witches living in Oaxaca and the various troubles they got into. I liked the look of that soap opera, those men and women who seemed straight out of Dallas or Falcon Crest all shouting at each other, casting spells, promising revenge, and lit by the cheesy special effects that made their already spectral appearance even more incredible. I couldn’t understand most of what was being said at first, having had just two years of high school Spanish before this. But about a month into my stay, while watching the show, I had the realization that I understood everything the witches were saying. The ads came on and I understood those also. The news came on and I understood that as well. It was as if the show had cast a spell on me.

  I had crossed over into fluency. I said something to that effect to Panchita, and she smiled and laughed, congratulating me. She herself spoke only a little more Spanish than me, she joked, and made me the treat of an extra tortilla that day.

  MY HOST BROTHER, MIGUEL Ángel, snorted almost nightly at the unfairness of my program when he came home from summer school to find me tanned and reading. He was a tall, lanky seventeen-year-old with a sort of dreamy teen-idol beauty gone slightly, if adorably, awry. He had large front teeth that were endearingly crooked, and he wore the tightest, thinnest jeans of anyone I knew, his hair cut in a Leif Garrett shag. At some point after arriving home from school, Miguel would
begin getting ready for the evening, showering and dressing carefully for the disco. I found these preparations alien and thrilling—the application of cologne being nearly mystical to watch.

  And I watched it all.

  I felt sometimes like a camera, shocked when people noticed me. I was a little in love with him and his friends, young men of sixteen or seventeen, a year or two older than me, all beauties, and I wanted to know everything I could, as if, per the Dune novels, all of this detail might confer some greater mastery over the objects of my desire. There was a code to it all, it seemed, something underneath the smooth rhythm of the day and night, and that was what I wanted to crack.

  Miguel and I would meet up with his friends at the overlook of the town’s dump, a hillside where we parked and drank, tailgating with brandy and Coca-Cola, mixed into a sticky-sweet and satisfying drink for the hot summer nights, before they all went out to the discos. Drinking with these young men left me a little drowsy from the liquor, and a sensual sort of atmosphere took hold of my imagination, a sense that something was almost about to happen.

  These boys were all waiting for the girls, who took longer to get ready, and we drank as they dressed and made themselves up. I watched for the moment the girls would arrive, the way the group of boys at the overlook would change when they did. I already knew at this point that I was gay, and so I was forever looking for other signs of it in the landscape. What I was looking for was what seemed to vanish then. The girls arrived in their own cars, the headlights sweeping the scene where we stood, illuminated by them. Out they’d step, confident, glamorous in their makeup, their legs shining, lips flashing wet with lip gloss, their new manicures and pedicures giving off sparks in the night. The boys would growl hellos, smiling like cartoon wolves.

  Two of Miguel’s friends in particular held most of my attention. They seemed to be deeply in love with each other, in a kind of easy masculine protectorate that we all respected without quite acknowledging it. They weren’t what I thought of as macho per se, but they seemed manlier than I could ever be, and they kept very close to each other, always. Before the girls’ arrival, they would sit together, arms around each other, handsome and easy, and from where I sat I could feel everywhere their skin touched, as if the heat of it could be felt with my eyes. Sometimes, at the end of the night, one would lay his head on the other’s shoulder, and I would ache for the rest of the night from that sight. But on seeing the girls’ cars, they lifted off each other, as if what was there was not there.

  Everyone was friendly with me, but to my knowledge, no one was flirting with me. I was too young. I was not stylish. I did not have a gold chain. I did not have anything special about me, to my mind, except my eyes, which I was proud of, and which people often said were beautiful. And which I was using, sure that my dream of power was something they could make come true. I was probably a starer, to be honest. I was from Maine, with my ordinary side-parted brown hair cut in an ordinary way, jeans of an ordinary cut, ordinary polo shirts.

  Most of my notebooks have a doodle in them of a staring eye. Sometimes as I drew it, I was staring at myself. Sometimes I had the sense, as I finished the drawing, that I was staring back at me. I still draw these. The eye a perfect talisman for a boy who believed his watching both hid him and gave him power.

  SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING, THOUGH it had, in a sense, already happened. I felt at home in Mexico in a way I never had before.

  My new fluency in Spanish was part of it. I was the first of the twelve students in my high school group to accomplish this—undeniably the main purpose of being in Chiapas. I was also the only Asian, nonwhite student in the group. On field trips the other kids started asking me what “they” were saying, or they’d ask me to speak for them. The only exchanges the students had mastered were basic—¿Cuánto cuesta? How much does this cost?—and so I felt a tiny contempt whenever I conceded and helped them.

  As we were otherwise left on our own when the trips were not happening, I kept to myself as much as I could and never knew how the other Americans spent their time without me. Nick Stark was the only one of these students I sought out. He was, like all of them, hopelessly bad at pronunciation and with no memory for vocabulary, but I was friends with him mostly because I found him very handsome. He had become my best friend out of all the American students, by default. We often swam together in the afternoons, after my television show hour, at the Tuxtla country club’s outdoor pool, where our host families were both members, and in doing so, the sun had turned us completely brown, except for the space barely covered by our swimsuits. I went along with it because Nick never mocked me, and I enjoyed looking at him. When he took off his Speedo or put it on, his tan line flashed white in the changing room, so bright it was like a camera flash.

  Nick had dark hair and eyes like me, and looked, with his mouth closed, like many of the Mexican members of the club, most of them from European backgrounds, and so when we swam there, by and large we attracted little attention unless we spoke. But when Nick opened his mouth, he showed his giant white, straight American teeth, the product of perfectly attended orthodontist visits. Mine were also large and white, but a little crooked, like my mother’s teeth, and like theirs—not enough to get fixed but enough to assist me, along with my better accent, in passing. I had already noticed that the Mexicans here in Tuxtla were less obsessed with braces than we were back in America, even the rich ones I had met. Orthodontics, in the 1970s, was a very American obsession. And I had noticed what Nick would now point out to me: that I also looked Mexican. Or, really, it was a little more than that.

  “You’re going native,” he said to me one day as we changed after swimming. The smell of chlorine and rust hung in the cold green lockers of the country club, and I closed mine carefully, which dimmed the odor only slightly. I was pleased by him saying this and wanted more information, but also the pleasure of watching him change clothes distracted me. By now I was aware that I was attracted to him, and I had learned to modulate my attention to him so that it seemed like I was no more interested in his beauty than anything else around us. But that day, his penis swung up and down as he spoke, as if his vocal cords were strung to it, and was a rosy pink in the center of that blinding white border of skin between his beautifully brown top and bottom halves. He looked like a very sexy Neapolitan ice cream treat.

  He was waiting for me to turn and face him, holding out his navy swimsuit, waiting to step inside of it.

  “How exactly do you mean ‘native’?” I asked him.

  Nick struggled with this for a moment. I think he had hoped I’d know what he meant. “Uh, well, you know. You could, like, pretend to be Mexican. Your Spanish is really good. You sound Mexican.”

  “Yeah?” I sat down on the bench by the locker. Nick stood as if waiting to be released from this conversation in order to put on his suit.

  In retrospect, he may have been flirting with me also.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure you could convince anyone here. You could totally play Mexican.” His penis swung again, and now that I was seated, it was at my eye level. I looked up at his face so he wouldn’t notice me noticing it, but I could see it in and out of the edge of my vision, tantalizing. I asked more questions. “Are you bored yet? Isn’t it weird that we have no classes? Pablo’s a madman to have set the summer up this way.” Pablo was our Spanish teacher, Mr. Castellanos, whom we always referred to as Pablo. We never called him Mr. Castellanos.

  “No,” he said. “I’m having a blast.” This produced at least a few more swings. He finally put on his suit and smiled at me as he settled the drawstring inside, as if he’d accomplished something quite difficult. Then I stood and we went out to the pool.

  At dinner that night, I told my host family at last the news about my fluency, and they bragged to one another about how I was the best of the American students, and how proud of me they were. Each of the other Americans was brought up and dismissed as lesser than me. “Lo más bueno,” my host father said, pointin
g to me. Cela beamed as they congratulated themselves on their plan of not speaking to me in English, and confirmed that I sounded just like a Mexicano. As they said this, I saw a change come over their eyes, as if I had been revealed as one of their own.

  THE GUTIéRREZ FAMILY WERE bewilderingly rich to me. Miguel’s youngest sister, for example, was away at a finishing school in Switzerland. His older sister had also been to one, the same one. I’d never met a family with this tradition. I understood that Mr. Gutiérrez ran an import-export business, but when I tried to imagine what that was, I could only picture bales of cash being unloaded off of enormous ships.

  They were the first family I ever knew to employ a houseboy. His name was Uriel, and he tended the garden in the courtyard, washed the three cars every other day, and picked the mangoes up off the ground, in addition to whatever he did out of my sight. Uriel worked shirtless in the heat, spraying the cars down, himself glazed by the water and the sweat, and in a way, of all the boys I was in love with that summer, he was chief among them.

  I had watched him for weeks from my window, too shy to approach him, too unsure of my Spanish, but now that I was fluent—such that I was—I went down at last and reintroduced myself. He had met me on my arrival but we hadn’t really spoken since, just the occasional smile and nod. He was shy too, and when he smiled it was as if we were in a movie and the soundtrack changed. He was deeply tanned from working in the sun all day. I knew his name was an angel’s name—an archangel, really. Which only made him glow more in my eyes.

  I was young enough, naïve enough, to imagine we could be friends, and I did eventually write a short story about a boy like me on a trip like this, the two of us in love. But this was a fantasy. I was learning there was a gulf between us that could not be as carelessly crossed by my learning Spanish. For all I was trying to vanish into the surroundings, I was still the American visitor, and he knew it well, whatever he also felt. He kept our interactions polite and ordinary. If he was aware of my crush on him, he did not let on. I did not yet understand how the class difference between us was, at the time, a greater barrier than the language. He had to be polite to me, no matter what he felt.