How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

The point of it is in the possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination’s limits. Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can’t imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn’t matter. It isn’t. Much the way you don’t know what a writer will go on to write, you don’t know what a reader, having read you, will do.

This is Alex Chee, when asked by a student, in despair and hopelessness, on what was actually the point of writing. To me, this was the most profound sentence from the book. It made me think but when done, it made complete sense. It is an amazing thought, put so well across.