"There is a difference. I will write an essay without quite knowing where it’s going to go. But also with an essay, I’m kind of communicating with who I used to be or really searching for that person. There’s different tricks that I come to to help with remembering some of those things. Sometimes I look at my old writing to see what I was trying to do and what can be recuperated. But I also look at my book. My books are ways of remembering my life as well. The book is a memory of a particular time when I bought or read it. I think it’s why it’s so hard for people to combine libraries when they get together with someone. It’s like, your personal library becomes this unconscious portrait of your intellectual history."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from the United StatesBloggers from the United States20th-century poets from the United StatesGay poetsJournalists from Rhode Island
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
On how essay writing differs from his other forms of writing in “THE TIME FOR QUEER LIT IS NOW: A CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER CHEE” in Interview (2018 Apr 24)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Chee
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Alexander Chee
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Alexander Chee →
Related Quotes
"I did something with my first novel that I think a lot of debut novelists do, which is they act as if it was a freak …"
"I think fiction is the thing you invent to fit the shape of what you learned and nonfiction is the thing you invent t…"
"There’s some way of thinking about how the body can be articulate that translates into how you tell stories on the pa…"
"In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow. West…"
"The wilderness begins at the edge of my body, at the edge of my consciousness, and extends to the edge of the univers…"
"I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the sto…"
"This is not a man who sits down to "write a poem"; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to kno…"
"For we Americans, though we are the most restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins, alm…"
"Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to judge it. It stands apart from all the cities i…"
"Kansas used to believe in Populism and free silver. It now believes in hot summers and a hot hereafter."