LAST SUMMER I read and learned from Chee’s essay “How to Unlearn Everything,” so when a friend mentioned he was reading and enjoying this, I decided to give it a try.
It’s brilliant—a collection of personal essays, mainly about the writing life. Other topics come up (family, Chee’s time as an AIDS activist, gardening, tarot, William F. Buckley [!]), but writing is the ground tone.
Chee writes of taking a class with Annie Dillard, of badmouthing the Iowa Writers Workshop but deciding to go anyway, of the mazy paths between having an experience and writing fiction about that experience. The title essay could be a valuable corrective for anyone who thinks that writing an autobiographical novel is mainly a matter of recalling what happened to you and writing it down.
Also enlightening are “The Autobiography of My Novel” and “100 Things about Writing a Novel,” but “The Guardians” turns out to be the most revealing about the demands of autobiographical fiction.
My favorite essay, though, might have been “The Rosary,” about growing roses...but I’m not sure that wasn’t actually about writing as well.
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