Alexander Chee

The title came as something of a joke, is meant as something of a joke about that question that you get so often at readings and interviews.

People will ask, so how autobiographical is this?

And when I was a debut author, I was really enraged by the question.

I remember, I think I asked the first person who asked it to me something effective like, would it matter if you knew?

Like, would you believe it more if I told you what was real, quote unquote, and what was imagined?

There's certainly that expectation, I think.

And I think there's also something of, there's just something around it all.

Like I remember when I read from my second novel, The Queen of the Night, there's a scene where the main character

Her mother has died in the winter, and in order to bury her, she burns down their house.

She's leaving.

Her whole family is dead.

She burns down the house so that she can warm the land enough to dig her mother's grave.

And there was this woman I remember who approached me after the reading who said, it's almost as if you did that.

Did you ever do that?"

And I was like, no, no, no.

And I think in some ways it's almost as if the spell that you cast is strong enough, people almost can't believe that you didn't do it in some way.

And so in its own way, the question is actually a compliment to the power of what you've invented.

But it still is something that I think of as being curious to me because when I was a young reader, I never was curious about writers.

I only loved the books.

It never occurred to me to ask what their lives were like, whether or not they'd lived through these things.