Kay Dubb

“I was by now used to people being surprised by me and my background, and their surprise offended me. I was always having to be what I was looking for in the world, wishing the person I would become already existed — some other I before me. I was forever finding even the tiniest way to identify with someone to escape how empty the world seemed to be of what I was.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Something new is made from my memories and yours as you read this. It is not my memory, not yours, and it is born and walks the bridges and roads of your mind, as long as it can. After it has left mine.

All my life I've been told this isn't important, that it doesn't matter. And yet I think it does. I think it is the real reason the people who would take everything from us say this. I think it's the same reason that when fascists come to power, writers are among the first to go to jail. And that is the point of writing.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“...the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure and success.”
― Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, “You don’t need to be nice.” My mother said that was when I became trouble.”
― Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries: A Memoir