The Universally Particular: An Essay Review of Alexander Chee’s How To Write An Autobiographical Novel
This is a personal essay disguised as a review. Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is a novel disguised as an essay collection. These words are all a work of fiction, a critical imagining. Just a mask on top of another mask, as all literature is the exceeding of form, a manipulation of the general in order to give the particular. There is no fiction, there is no nonfiction. There is no one way to write, there is no universal experience. There is but art, Chee teaches us, art produced by the body which creates it, and the processes and experiences of that body which brings art into the world.
Marcos Gonsalez on How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee.