Alexander Chee

...you can lose more than you thought possible and still grow back, stronger than anyone imagined.

They had the faces of angels and the determination of demons.

When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.

Mixed feelings were confusing feelings, and I didn’t feel confused except as to why it was so hard for everyone to understand that I existed. Living this way felt like discovering your shoe was nailed to the floor, but only one of them, so that you paced, always, a circle of possibility, defined by the limited imaginations of others.

It’s much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction — to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see.

I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed to love.

I still didn't know I had written it to do this, but then I did.
I wish I could show you the roomful of people who've told me the novel is the story of their lives. Each of them as different as could be.
I still don't know if I'd be in that room.

I wanted to prepare for a life of sudden transformations, of enemies singing at you across the stage dressed in the costume of a lover.

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Hate is love on fire, set out to burn like a flare on the side of the road. It says, stop here. Something terrible has happened. Envy is like, the skin you're in burns. And the salve is someone else's skin.

SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die.

Nothing to fear from a fate that was already yours, then, except, perhaps, that it would never leave you.

Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.

All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.

I wanted to be a teacher; my namesake was a teacher, and ever since knowing that, a tiny part of me has known, I was meant to stand in front of a group of children. I love my job, my fast students, my bright swimmers. Love watching someone figure something out and then use it, watch the idea go from me to them and see how it belongs to them afterward. Not mine at all. And afterward, you can only wonder at how it happens. It doesn't happen all the time. But when it does, it feels like this is what magic wants to be, when it grows up.

I resented the idea of being talented. I couldn’t respect it — in my experience, no one else did. Being called talented at school had only made me a target for resentment. I wanted to work. Work, I could honor.