Dorothy, a publishing project

In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.

At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin’s Autobiography draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.

*

Read a wonderful essay by Lana Lin about the cover of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (and much more) at LitHub. Read an interview (about reading) with Lana at Shelf Awareness.

*

“Lyrical prose, palpable love, and formal audacity coalesce to make this a must-read.” Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Experimental artist, filmmaker, and writer, Lana Lin, uses the literary form invented by Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas to tell the story of her 25-year queer partnership and artistic collaboration. Narrated through the eyes of her partner, readers follow Lan Thao from her youth in Vietnam, her years in Canada after the Vietnam War, and the couple’s first encounter in New York City in The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam—an exploration of cancer, queerness, anti-Asian hate, and the delights and challenges that have connected the artists’ lives for decades.” National Book Award Judges

“Lin’s ingenious and absorbingly tender book meditates on dyadic identity while honoring the miracle and the mundaneness of bonded life.” Megan Milks, 4Columns

“The spaciousness to invent (and deconstruct) the self is Lin’s most compelling quality as a writer and filmmaker. In the short film Unidentified Vietnam No. 18, an addendum to Lin + Lam’s first shared project concerning the historiography of 1960s propaganda films, a ghostly figure fades in and out of a mausoleum-like hallway, obscuring itself at will; Lin does the same with this wondrous little text, peregrinating across continents, anatomies, and identities as both herself and her lover, as stalwart narrator and evasive subject. She resolves at the finish, “I am I, Lan Thao Lam, and I am Not-I, Lana Lin,” or, I am the you that is in me.” Saffron Maeve, The Believer

“To pay homage to another writer, especially such a famous one, in the way Lin does here, with clear-eyed curiosity and appreciation without adulation, is an exciting project. The resulting text can teach us a lot about how we might relate to our elders, both in artistic and in political movements. Instead of either wholeheartedly emulating them or discarding them completely, Lin shows we can interact with their work with a twinned sense of kinship and of criticism, and always with an eye toward telling our own stories in our own ways.” H Felix Chau Bradley, Xtra

“A love story, a litany, a catalog of observations, a guidebook of emotions, a ghost story, a map, a travelogue, a critique of authenticity, and a search for home, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam lives in the transition between loneliness and connection. Invoking Gertrude Stein’s refusal of fixity while indicting her racist assumptions, Lana Lin creates a text that swims between personal history, art criticism, and collage. This is a book that plays with memory, grief, and solitude to reveal the rituals of intimacy that sustain a creative life.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

“In her brilliant revision of the queer archive, Lana Lin not only brings the understory of the Asian diaspora to the surface but into luminous frame. The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is a testament to our different histories and to how, through shared stories and everyday habits, we merge and become each other over time. If you asked me to give you a gift through which you could discover yourself in others, I would offer you this book.” Julietta Singh, author of The Breaks

*