Event Description

As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times, and “brilliant” by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. 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, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing ​– ​Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley ​– ​the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, 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

ALEXANDER CHEE is the author of the novels Edinburgh, for which he won a Whiting Award, and Queen of the Night, which was a national bestseller. His essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel was named a best book of the year by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, NPR, and Time. In 2025 Kirkus Reviews named it one of the hundred best books of nonfiction of the 21st century. Chee is a recipient of the NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, and Civitella Ranieri. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, and NPR, among other publications, and he is a Contributing Editor at The New Republic. He lives in New York City.