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You Write What You Read
By Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee's writing has appeared in Interview, Big, Out, and the anthologies Boys Like Us, Loss Within Loss, and Men on Men 2000. Edinburgh is his first novel. Visit his website: www.alexanderchee.com

"You write what you read," Annie Dillard told us in my college writing class at Wesleyan University 14 years ago. So be careful about what that is.

I remember that day vividly. Other people in the room were looking a bit self-congratulatory, as in, "Good thing I read Brothers Karamazov last summer." Or, "I was right to take that Joyce seminar. Can't wait until I write Ulysses."

Not me. My mind traveled back over a list as varied as a used bookstore. Yes, I might write Ulysses next, it struck me then. Except that Bloom would be Daisy, (Princess Daisy, Judith Krantz), and have pyrokinetic powers (Firestarter, Stephen King), and ride a horse she'd tamed herself (The Black Stallion, Walter Farley) on the beach there in Ireland. I was doomed.

When I was six we moved from Guam to Maine in November. In one month I went from swimming in endless expanses of blue water and sleeping in an apartment in the island's rain forest to a colonial house on a cold street. The only Asian thing for 50 miles besides me and my family was the Japanese maple in our yard. And the ocean was dark in Maine, almost the color of the stone beaches I first saw there, which, while beautiful, made my previous years feel like an impossible dream. I didn't want to stay. But I didn't want to escape. Not, at least, until my first lunch period in the first grade, where, in a room filled with white children, this precocious reader found a word he'd never heard before for Chinese people. After getting the definition from them once they stopped pulling their eyes out to the sides and talking in fake accents, and me trying to explain where Korea was and failing, I decided I needed some sort of fort to hide in from people who either didn't know or care about either Korea or Guam: the two places that mattered to me more than anything right then.

I found the Cape Elizabeth Thomas Memorial Library, a beautifully kept, long-since expanded white building full of books, the memory of which still produces in me a sense of relief. For it worked. The books weren't of the slightest interest to these newenemies of mine, and the enforced silence kept them from saying that word and some others, at least until I left the building's ionizing force field of silence. And so I was transformed from a kid who ran down beaches with his friends to a kid who read about beaches and other places in books about kids he imagined would be his friends, if he could ever get the chance to speakwith them.

For that reason, during those years I was ruthless about my reading. After discovering in the third grade that playtime detention meant sitting in the classroom alone with a book, I went after it deliberately, most memorably with a series of homework boycotts. Iread wherever I stood or sat, and eventually learned to walk and read at the same time without hitting people or trees on the half-mile from my house to the school; from class to class; while walking up and down the stairs; and between the rooms. I kept books open on my lap in the fifth grade, reading while the teacher spoke. I remember one afternoon I was half-paying attention, impatient to get back inside my pages. And this teacher famous for firing chalkboard erasers at students who didn't pay attention shot one my way. My peripheral vision -- trained to allow me to see obstacles as I walked and read -- neatly picked it up.

I took my eyes off the page, my fingers held my place, and I swung up my plastic-wrapped library copy of Little House On The Prairie, bouncing it to the windowsill. The class, which hadn't much liked or understood me prior to that, laughed, me sneezing into the dust cloud around me. I let myself laugh a little then as well, but then we quickly resumed our enmity.

The librarians, impressed, allowed me at the age of 11 to begin taking out books from the "adult" section of the library: the above-mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder was my first memorable step over the line, followed by Frazer's The Golden Bough, books about ESP, and the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. Then in a few years, the novels of Mary Renault: Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy. These in turn were followed by John Cheever's The Wapshot Chronicle and Falconer.

During this same period, enormous quantities of 450-page novels (Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke's many intergalactic adventures) were matched by Gordon Merrick's many deeply forbidden bestselling mass-market paperbacks about wealthy gay boys who were always draped over Greek islands and yachts, in love with the wrong man. I read and reread Tolkien for four summers in high school. And I couldn't forget the Hardy Boys, The Nancy Drew mysteries, the Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis, the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, the Dune books, and Tolstoy, which I read far too young. And the comic books: The X-Men ruled my life, and Batman and Robin, my fantasies. I wanted mutant powers, a secret tool belt, and a cave more than anything.

When I became old enough to baby-sit, Gordon Merrick's straight counterparts: Judith Krantz and Danielle Steel. And then, just to make things really odd, senior year in high school I read just four of Ezra Pound's The Cantos for my senior paper, using all 11 reference books beside me (among them, dictionaries for Greek, Spanish, Italian, and a book with the Chinese pictographs he used translated for reference).

For these reasons I left Annie's class that spring day deeply concerned. I decided I had to be good going forward, as I had recognized the truth in what she'd said immediately. I was reluctant to admit that, at the age of 21, my inner life was a whirlwind of giant sand-serpents the size of highways eating their way through the early American Midwest and passing unruffled children who could see the wind; they in turn accompanied by their magical lion guides; and all of them looking for intelligent rodents performing stunts on miniature vehicles in the back cabinets of the homes of Russian peasants. The whole time a soundtrack from naiads singing from the sea's rocks, burning Chinese pictographs written in fire in the air over their heads. It was all a mystery no two brother detectives, also lost in there, might unravel. What could come out after what had gone in?

The answer was, a novel. And then several more.

"Quote to me from your work," he said. "Your favorite line."

This was just last week. The questioner was the boyfriend of another writer I know, and he was feeling sly and tipsy, up for games. The question made me feel like a gold coin bitten for authenticity, which it was supposed to do. I had run into these two at my favorite local bar here in Brooklyn, NY. He hadn't read me, he confessed, and looked for a moment to his partner, busy talking to someone else.

"Easy," I said. I looked him in the eyes as I said it: There's a hole in me the size of you.

The line is found in my first novel, Edinburgh, and I've recently decided it is essentially not very different from the first book I ever read, a book whose name escapes both me and my mom. Please let me know somehow if you know which one it is. It had a spiral binding, and told the story of a hen who loses her egg. Each page was very thick, and had a hole on the right side, always in a different place. Each two-page spread featured the hen's chase across the landscape, and the hole was the place where the egg had gone to next as it kept rolling. Greater and greater risk; greater and greater speed on the part of the hen; numerous stories from the parties who had just seen it; all of it ending up with a broken egg -- a chick -- smiling at the center, waiting for the mother. Suspense, children in danger, rapprochement.

I believe I learned my pacing and some of my images right there. My novel traces the life of a young man who is sexually abused as a child and stays silent about it, then considers that silence complicity with his abuser when that man goes on to commit other crimes against his friends. Two of his closest friends take their lives over the internal conflict they feel, in particular the one he had been in love with, and had failed back then to protect. Blaming himself for their troubles and deaths, he tries to take his own life several times. At last he gives up, decides to live, and as an adult, meets a young man who is the image of that first love. And this young man has blond hair. Very much like a chick emerging unscathed from a broken egg that has traveled in ways the follower couldn't have imagined from the original loss. Our main character, for believing himself the source of this trouble, is the pursuant fowl. This boy has, of course, a secret to tell our main character that he can't guess. But I won't ruin it for you.

The line I quoted in the bar to my mind can only have originated in those pages with their egg-shaped holes in them, the edges of which I traced as a small child again and again as I waited for the pages to turn at my mother or father's hand.

Some other items are in there: one of the main visual themes for the book is fire (Firestarter), and there's a wild party at the home of some very rich handsome brothers (any Gordon Merrick), and at the end of the party emerges a fiery vision of that first friend (the X-Men Phoenix cycle). The main character builds an underground lair for himself (Batman).

As I work on the next books -- two novels and a book of nonfiction -- I can see the rest slowly emerging. Pound, for all his political folly, knew one day there would be such a thing as an American intelligence drawing on several cultures at the same time for artistic influence. Thus, the calligraphy and multi-lingual poems of The Cantos must inform The Calligrapher's Grave, my book of nonfiction about my family. One of my next two novels, The Queen of the Night, set in the 19th century, is very much drawn from Little House on the Prairie, as well as from Jeanette Winterson's The Passion. And the Hardy Boys, crossed with the Narnia Chronicles, wrapped across Vita Sackville-West's biography of Joan of Arc, Saint Joan of Arc, and coated in the Lone Wolf and Cub graphic novels by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima will eventually become my baby known as Saint Spencer of the Lost.

So, Annie's right. Be very, very careful. You write what you read.

Purchase Alexander Chee's Edinburgh at BookSense.com.

Author photo: Eric McNatt

Further Reading:

• Julie Otsuka
• Suzy McKee Charnas
• Carolyn Miller
• Adrian Tomine
• Christopher Locke

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