Alexander Chee and A Couple of People I Used To Be

On reaching for our rejected selves with the essay

If you are opening this message, wondering why you received it, well, I am Alexander Chee, and it may be you signed up for this newsletter back when it was my author TinyLetter. In late 2019, or 2020, I migrated the email list there over to this space in the early days of Substack. And some of you found me here in the summer of 2020 after my Shipman Agency classes.

I had the intention at that time of launching this as a newsletter about writing and the teaching of writing, and that absolutely came to a halt in the fall of 2020, when I returned to teaching full time during the first year of COVID. So I apologize for that long silence.

In any case, I am emerging from a relative quiet with a brief announcement: I spent much of the last year editing Best American Essays 2022, and now that it is done, set to appear this November, I am teaching another Shipman Agency class, “A Couple of People I Used To Be,” starting this Monday night, July 11th, 6:30-8:30pm EST, the first of two two-hour sessions. The second is a month later, on August 8th, same time. Both sessions will be available by recording for a month after each session.

The course is the first of several to come from constructing my criteria for the essays I selected for Best American, a daunting process that involved me reading many more essays than I imagined at first. I found myself thinking about the essays written about about the selves we have cast off, selves suppressed in memory, or otherwise left behind. The essays we write when we find ourselves confronted with the people we used to be, the people we meant to be, people we want to be, and the people we fear we are and have been or may yet be someday. The essays that are so often my favorites.

If the title of the class sounds familiar, it is drawn from a favorite quote from Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward’s Bethlehem, the title essay:

“Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. 

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about.”

In the first class, I will discuss "Report From The Bahamas, 1982," by June Jordan; "Close Calls and Fulfilled Dreams," by Dmitri Nabokov; “Lost Cat," by Mary Gaitskill; “Sliver of Sky,” by Barry Lopez.

If you’re not familiar with them, June Jordan reinvents the travel essay as an exercise in political solidarity when she tries to take a vacation; Dmitri Nabakov's presents a fake journal in the present tense, drawn from episodes that move across his entire life from age 1-54, beginning with his escape from Nazi Germany as a child; Mary Gaitskill loses her cat and seems, also, to lose something more significant and harder to place as she probes the relationship between herself and her cat; Barry Lopez reconciles his own childhood sexual abuse as a way to understand the systemic nature of what happened to him as well as the personal nature of it.

In the second class, we discuss "Putting Myself Together," by Jamaica Kincaid; "On Becoming An American Writer," by James Alan McPherson; “To Speak Is To Blunder,” by Yiyun Li; "Autobiography of My Novel," by me, Alexander Chee.

I learned a great deal from Jamaica Kincaid's observations of her daily habits of self-presentation, and the way this became a way to observe herself and who she was then in her late 20s, and who she she thought she might become; James Alan McPherson’s meditation on the 14th Amendment changed me. As a way to understand himself and his career as a writer in relationship to America and American history and the idea of the as yet unfulfilled promise of America, it is a masterful piece of writing; Yiyun Li describes her decision to give up speaking and thinking in her first language, Mandarin Chinese, as an act of self creation as a writer; my own essay, "The Autobiography of My Novel," about my attempt to overcome not just the internal paralysis after my own experience of sexual abuse but the ideas that set up that paralysis to begin with, reimagining the character of my own imagination.

For both classes, I will give writing prompts based on the essays we are reading for class. This is, to be clear, a pair of lectures with readings and linked writing prompts, and not a workshop. I will answer questions in each class.

Scholarships are available. The class will be ASL interpreted. I hope to see there.