The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin reimagines Gertrude Stein’s classic experiment in life writing for a new century. Blending memoir, myth, and critical inquiry, Lin explores queer partnership, artistic collaboration, and the fragmented ways we remember our lives.
We caught up with Lin via email to get some insight into the book, Gertrude Stein, and the art of autobiomythography.
Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas provides inspiration for this book, yet you were able to strike out and make something original. Why and how did you choose Stein’s work as inspiration for your book?
I find Gertrude Stein’s device of writing about herself in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas through the voice of her lifetime partner an ingenious method for depersonalizing the personal while also producing a sense of intimacy. I wanted to inhabit that space of writing. The kind of life writing I’m interested in is not merely or maybe not even primarily about self-expression; it’s about recognition of the other, and being recognized by the other. Stein provided a structure that I could push against, inserting the disappeared presence of Asian queers to counter her narrative of implicitly white, “male” geniuses. (But of course, the proclaimed narrative of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is always already resisting itself because it is equally a narrative of gossiping wives, if we take Stein’s world, as Alice tells it, to be composed of geniuses and their wives. Although Stein identified as a woman, she fulfilled the category of male genius.)
I am also attracted to the myth of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s relationship, both in terms of its homosexuality and collaboration. (I actually named my laptop Toklas years before I started writing this book.) Theirs was a 25-year love affair when Stein wrote The Autobiography. Lan Thao’s and mine is 25 years this year. Stein and Toklas collaborated to make a life together in which the arts played a central role. Lan Thao and I share this with our predecessors. The effects of war and negotiating the urban and rural are also common points of reference. As I researched their lives and my book, it was a little uncanny how many aspects of our histories align.
How did inhabiting Lan Thao Lam’s voice influence your sense of identity and your relationship?
In the book I say (or Lan Thao says) that in the process of writing it Lana protests that she is writing herself out of existence, but then she wonders if she is writing herself into existence. The complaint, I think, derived from the fact that when I was sharing drafts with my writing group everyone seemed more absorbed in Lan Thao’s story than in Lana’s, which played into my own insecurities. But it did open up a space of writing that allowed me to, in effect, write myself into existence, to give voice to myself. Writing about oneself in the third person offers a distance from which one can take stock of oneself and perhaps approach oneself with sympathy and care that doesn’t come about instinctively or naturally. It’s a kind of artificial space of an impossible self-analysis.
It didn’t affect our relationship, at least not in a way that I have taken note of. But Lan Thao and I joke about how it feeds into an already ever-present confusion between our identities on the part of others. I take full responsibility for that.
How did you approach weaving and balancing these different geographies, histories, and traumas into a single narrative?
I really used Stein’s chapter headings as my guide, following her achronological template. For Stein’s “Before I Came to Paris” I have “Before I Came to New York.” Her “My Arrival in Paris” is “My Arrival in New York.” “Gertrude Stein in Paris—1903-1907” is “Lana Lin in New York, 1988-1999.” “Gertrude Stein Before She Came to Paris” is “Lana Lin Before She Came to New York.” “1907-1914” is “2001-2019” “The War” is “The War.” “After the War—1919-1932” is “After the War” in my Autobiography. I leave it open to interpretation what war I am referencing in “After the War.” My chapter “The War” is devoted to Lan Thao’s childhood experience of the war in Vietnam. As a result, my book is a slightly more balanced chronicle of both Lan Thao and my lives whereas Stein’s is more oriented to Stein with Toklas as her mouthpiece.
Stein’s chapter titles serve as containers for moments that seemed significant, because they were consequential life or world events, or because they were banal. I was interested in spending time with what could be considered trivial, inconsequential, or mundane rather than focusing on the supposedly dramatic. The book was drawn from memories and aspires to conjure the non-linear, episodic quality of the mnemonic.
To my mind, the text doesn’t unfold into a single overarching narrative; it is a highly selective glimpse at various points in my life and our lives together. The chapter on the war is probably the only chapter that I expressly tried to construct a dramatic narrative of Lan Thao’s escape from Vietnam. Conventional novels and movies give the impression that life progresses through a dramatic arc, but in reality, I believe we recall our lives in fragments. The work of memoir usually attempts to re-construct these bits and pieces into a coherent whole. My autobiography–it’s actually categorized as autobiomythography–doesn’t seek to do that. I’ve been using the term “autobiomythography,” drawing on Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” which is a genre forged by women of color incorporating material that would be excised or overlooked in traditional autobiography: myth, dreams, misremembered memories, hearsay, the speculative.
As a filmmaker and visual artist, how did your background in experimental cinema shape writing this book?
For me, making a film bears some similarity to writing a book. Both have to do with constructing something out of my encounters with the world. Lan Thao and my collaborative work also originates in this mode of collecting. An archival impulse, the desire to discover and fantasize about archival materials, infects all of my work. My filmmaking and writing is also driven by montage. I think of the editing process for both film and writing as one of shaping, actively sculpting. I’m not a sculptor, but I’m married to one.
What do you hope readers, and writers, take away from this book?
The book asks what makes up our identities, what makes us who we are? How does one author a life; can we ever be disconnected from each other, from our environment? It suggests that we are permeable, plural beings with collaborative lives, but I also believe it presents the dilemma of being bound in and by our selves. I want the book to hold that enigma in tension, that we are our own persons but we are also the persons that come in contact with us, whom we allow to impregnate us, as Elliot allows E.T. to do. In the end I hope the book conveys that we bear responsibility to that which holds us, that which makes us who we are.
I also hope that readers recognize the marginalization of Asian queers in this part of the world, whether that is through identification with some aspect of that identity or through other senses of being excluded or made vulnerable.