About the book: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how lessons on the writing life 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 in this powerful work of queer literature, 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, the literary nonfiction in 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.