Alexander Chee, From Seat 19A
In a mini-interview, the dazzling author talks stealing things, rescuing things, and holding his liquor.
Editor’s note: Last week I accidentally sent an unfinished draft to every subscriber’s inbox. I hope that by now they’re a pile of ash and old nightmares because you lit yours on fire and then vowed to never speak of it as long as you live.
My Next Ghost is a growing collection of mini-interviews with people I like (small pool). Just a few scattered questions. Less “what’s your creative process?” and more, “have you ever seen a man slip on a banana peel?”
Alexander Chee
Current location: Seat 19A, on a Delta flight from Boston to Baltimore for AWP.
Eight-word memoir: This should be a novel, he said repeatedly.
What was your first concert and what did you wear?
Asia. Sunday, August 21st, 1983. I found a concert archive with all of the concerts at this one arena. I was with these two brothers I played D&D with. I don’t remember what we wore. If my mom had anything to say about it, I wore a maroon polo shirt. She was relentless about dressing me in that color.
Have you ever stolen anything?
Yes. In high school. I typically shoplifted gay pornography or the novels of Gordon Merrick with lavishly colored painted covers of their promiscuous gay male protagonists in bathing suits, sold often at Waldenbooks or in grocery stores in the 1970s and 1980s. They were popular with women as well as boys like me. They would be my introduction to a number of things.
Do you get tipsy or do you go from sober straight to drunk?
Tipsy, but people often don’t realize I’ve been drinking. I hold it pretty well.
Will you copy and paste your most recent text here?
“I just read a scene where everyone was gathering at the home of a woman who’d died, very private art collector, no children so her god child inherited, and they’re all realizing she stole things from all of them, a klepto. It’s hilarious and sad and really shrewd.”
—sent to our mutual friend the photographer Michael Sharkey,* who wanted to know what I thought of the Alan Hollinghurst novel The Sparsholt Affair.
* Blaise here. Incidentally, I spent yesterday afternoon with Michael Sharkey and his husband Jeffrey. We talked about Alex, and our old collegemate Kiran Desai’s new book (they recommend it), “The Great Muppet Caper” (I recommend it), and what our kids’ poop looks like (our kids are dogs). We probably talked about you, too.
Roller skating or ice skating?
Roller blades. Back in the 1990s in Brooklyn, you most likely saw me on them in Prospect Park or in the East Village.
What’s your desert island book?
I have novels I’ve reread so often but if I were to really just be alone for the rest of life with one book, or at least alone until rescued, it might be Baldwin: A Love Story, by Nicholas Boggs, a biography of James Baldwin, or A Great Unrecorded History, by Wendy Moffatt, her biography of Forster. Or it might be this most recent O. Henry Prize anthology, edited by Edward P. Jones. I’ve loved every story so far, which never happens.
What was your favorite toy when you were a kid?
A Gumby doll, and when we lived in Guam when I was a small child, my father would throw it in the pool, saying “Gumby’s drowning!” and then my brother and I would race to save him from the bottom of the pool. Pokey was also thrown in, but I loved Gumby.
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. A contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022.
He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.
He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.
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I didn't even know I needed to read this interview this morning, but it was brilliant! I love these questions and am writing them down.
Appreciate the shout-out to Gumby.