How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Metadata
- Author: Alexander Chee
- ASIN: B07HWZ3XLY
- ISBN: 1526609118
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B07HWZ3XLY
- Kindle link
Highlights
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. — location: 106
But on seeing the girls’ cars, they lifted off each other, as if what was there was not there. — location: 115
As if what was there was not there L
My interest, I can see now, was in whether I could know the answers without asking questions regarding my own insecurities. — location: 456
You, sitting here, paralyzed by fear, alone in your apartment, reading cards. — location: 467
What can you trust of what you can’t see? — location: 563
The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then. — location: 609
I mean, just what exactly is going on inside your piece? — location: 687
Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing it makes it possible. — location: 692
You might think that your voice as a writer would emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you’d be wrong. What I saw on the page was that the voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it has to be cut free. — location: 708
it’s habits of mind and habits of work. — location: 728
“In the long run, we only ever hit what we aim at.” — location: 745