"Why didn’t you just write about your experience? the reader asked me. Why isn’t it a memoir?

I looked at him and felt confused for a moment. I didn’t understand the question immediately. The questioner sounded annoyed, as if I were deliberately hiding something from him. As if he had ordered steak and gotten salmon. Had I chosen? I felt the presence of conflicting, confusing truths. I was talking with a book club in downtown Manhattan, on Wall Street, a paper cup of coffee on the table in front of me. All of us were seated around a conference table, blinking under a fluorescent light that felt, along the skin and eyes, both thin and heavy at once. Like this question.

The questioner was an otherwise nice white man, a few years older than me, I guessed. He would have been in high school when it all happened to me, and I wouldn’t have told him about it then. That I could even speak to him about it now was not lost on me.

The things I saw in my life, the things I learned, didn’t fit back into the boxes of my life, I said. My experiences, if described, wouldn’t portray the vision they gave me."
-Alexander Chee, The Autobiography of My Novel. I remain fairly tapped out this week (though cast-free and thriving), but I wouldn't have written anything this good about how I understand writing to work anyway, so here you go. In other news:
At some point, GRACE AND THE FEVER got translated into and then published in Turkish, so that rules. I'm obsessed with this pastel-cyborg cover. Extremely my & GRACE's aesthetic. 

Here is a story I've been working on for months, about healthy desserts-- low-calorie ice cream, black bean brownies, protein cookies-- and how no one really knows the difference between health and pleasure and want and need. Here are some paragraphs that got cut from it that I liked:
 

"It makes sense for wellness bloggers to promise that their carob recipe tastes like candy, just as it makes sense for dessert chefs like Tosi to market their cookies as good for your gut. In both cases, the idea is to sell us something we crave while also promising that it won’t saddle us with guilt.

Leaving aside the question of why any food should make us feel guilty, this is a fundamentally flawed goal. Because the idea that you can achieve guiltless, carefree indulgence misunderstands what indulgence actually is. The word derives from the Latin indulgeo: to be kind or tender. Over time, it evolved to signify kindness specifically in the face of a debt owed. The Catholic Church uses it to talk about god’s mercy: When we sin, we can do acts of repentance, for which god grants us an indulgence instead of punishing us for that sin.

When we indulge ourselves, we are granting ourselves grace in the face of bad behavior. There is no indulgence without sin. The pleasure we get from an indulgence comes directly from the knowledge that we have gotten away with something."

Speaking of... a lot of things, last week I went to a fancy press junket for a really upsetting show about a misogynist dystopia (yeah that one) and wrote about the cognitive dissonance and also an actress named Madeline Brewer, who I liked immensely, for Playboy.

Speaking of misogynist dystopias, you can still get tickets to the panel I'm doing in New York this weekend, on self-defense in the age of [redacted political figure]. Prices are donation-based, so don't let funds keep you away if you want to attend. 

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