Chee, Alexander. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2018. Transcribed 12/6/19.
- “To my mother and father, who taught me how to fight.”
- (11) “There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing. I think of this as one of the most important parts of my writer’s education—that when left alone with nothing else to read, I began to tell myself the stories I wanted to read.”
- (162) “canes furred with thorns”
- “The Self as Cipher: Salman Toor’s Narrative Paintings.” Whitney.org, 2019. https://whitney.org/essays/salman-toor-self-as-cipher. (12/8/20) (201) “Parts and Things brings to mind a quote by Alexander Chee, who, in reflecting on his own process of writing an autobiographical novel, calls his characters “ciphers” through which he examines his experiences; his fiction “a prosthetic voice”; and his practice “autonomic . . . 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.” Chee goes on to note, “I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others.””
- (203) “I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing that th person I would become already existed—some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was. My long-standing love for the singer Roland Gift, for example, came partly from finding out he was part Chinese. The same for the model Naomi Campbell. Unspoken in all of this was that I didn’t feel Korean American in a way that felt reliable. I was still discovering that this identity—any identity, really—was unreliable precisely because it was self-made.”
- (206) “This is how I remember the summer of being twelve to thirteen: fog-horn nights, days on bicycles at beaches, lunches of sandwiches and soda…. My hair is long and wavy and I am vain about the blond highlights at my temples that my father admires…. The tan French-Canadians arrive in cars, wear bikinis, eat lobsters, glitter in their gold jewelry and sun0tan oils. The New Yorkers bewilder and are bewildered, a little cranky. The Massachusetts contingent lords around, arrogant, bemused. They are al we have, these visitors.”