If you have waited years to read this book or wondered what, if anything, it could teach you as a writer or reader or even a human, shut up and read ’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

I will absolutely admit that I have never read an Alexander Chee novel, but I have read essays and interviews. My main reason for wanting to read this book with this book club is that I’ve heard How to Write an Autographical Novel talked about as a unique literary memoir that wasn’t really a craft book but was sorta a craft book with a unique structure. The structure is that the memoir is a collection of essays that are sometimes connected and sometimes not. Chee talks about writing and his career, but more than anything he talks about life. His life and the lives of those around him. His loves and failures. And it all makes the whole memoir more emotionally effective.

Before I start reading a book that I plan on annotating, I’ll write out what I want to learn and why I am reading the book. For How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I wrote:

Do you ever have a moment while reading an author memoir where they say something so unreal and true to your experience, life, and feelings, that it gives you hope for your career and self? I had this moment early on with Chee’s memoir.

This line came early in the book and reminded me of something from my childhood that used to happen a lot before I started writing. I used to have these dreams where I would be in bed or sitting somewhere fully engaged in a book. Then I would realize that I am dreaming and the book I am reading is one I am creating in real time as I read it. Realizing this, the dream deteriorates and the words fall out of the book and render nothing but blank pages.

This is a reoccurring dream that only happens when I am not writing. For a long while, I did not know what this dream meant. Now, that I have been writing non-stop since my mid-twenties, I have not had that dream. I think that, like Chee, there is a part of me that when not writing, still needs to write so it does so in dreams.

Another nice similarity between Chee and my life is that Chee went to the Bennington Writing Seminars, my MFA program. When I tried to find out more information, I found that he refers to two Benningtons, the seminars (the MFA program) and the workshops (a summer residency). I am a bit confused on the details but he may have gone to the Bennington Writing Workshops and not the Seminars since he went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for his MFA. Still, the connection of reading the book and seeing him talk about Bennington was a nice connection as I worked on my MFA thesis.

Subscribe now

Despite how much Chee throughout the beginning part of the memoir talks about life, he also spends a lot of time writing about how he learned how to write. I’ll get into more of that later, but the weaving of how much he commits to his craft and the love of life around him was inspiring. Even when working as a waiter or in cafes or bookstores, Chee still wrote, still looked at the world in a way that took the emotions and experiences in a way that pulls you into the protests, the anger, the love, and the wildness of his youth and life.

The chapter on losing a close friend and partner to AIDS almost made me cry. The love. The care. The death. The fight. I wanted to cry and scream to read about AIDS and spend everyday thinking of all those who died and the love lost. I am taken back with how Chee narrated the essay in a nonlinear spiraling way because I think that is the only way to tell this type of pain, from all around and up close, not shying away, but not rushing either.

Whatever topic Chee wrote about I wanted to explore more and get involved in. He weaves in his passion and emotions while building a full visual of a topic, making the pieces feel deeply touching. There was a chapter on rose gardening and it made me want to become a rose gardener, which I never considered before but the way Chee wrote about it made it seem like a fun challenge that would yield beautiful flowers both inside and out.

That style of writing is what makes How to Write an Autobiographical Novel such an emotional experience. You are there with Chee and it feels like he is not hiding anything from you or dressing it up to make him seem like the best person or writer in the world, though he also doesn’t hide his big dreamy desires.

Share Writing Skins

The top craft lessons I learned from How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

There is a whole essay called ‘100 Things About Writing a Novel’ that is an experience to read and one of my favorite lists on being a writer. I read the chapter while in the heat of writing my novel and the strangeness of the chapter really helped me trust the weirdness I was working with and lean into it more. A lot of what Chee wrote felt so true to my experience of writing my book. The novel is a stranger lover writer story and so much more and I was chasing after it because I couldn’t imagine not catching up with the novel, maybe even catching its eye and attention long enough to catch a glimpse at its face.

Don’t go in expecting that that chapter is going to be the one that tells you the secret to writing a good story. More than anything, that essay taught me how to not think about the technique so much as the story. It didn’t tell me how to do this, but the feeling I got from it was that the technique will emerge on its own if you keep chasing after the novel.

I have heard this before during my MFA experience from teachers. I will admit that by doing that type of wild, loose, and intuitive writing, my stories have gotten better, more unique, but I don’t think I could have done that style of writing free form as a new writer years ago. When I did do that type of writing before, while the stories were fun to me, they didn’t breach the depths of what a good story could do. Now, that I have lots of practice and study under my feet, I can lean into that wild style of writing and understand how to get in that groove that feels like talent or skill working its magic out on the page.

A lot about Chee’s memoir and Delany’s are similar in what they say about life and how they lived. A commonality that I am finding is that both authors lived their lives fully. While Delany did not have a job so to speak as much as odd ways of making money, he still spent a great deal of time operating outside of his social and class circles. His experiences and the general daring nature of both authors helped them, I believe, become the great writers they are.

Chee worked as a waiter for years and found that the life experience gained “out past the limits of my own social class.” He, like many other professional writers, believes that living is one of the best ways to be a better writer. “Your imagination needs to be broken in…to become anywhere near as weird as the world.”

When I read that line, I had to stop reading and just sit with it. I have been having this thing happen recently when I sit down to work on article pitches for magazines where I can tell that my imagination is too bound and limited by the way that I live my life. I’ve talked about this before in my Delany essay, but I live a very comfortable and cozy life. I work from home, have a reliable car, a cute ass cat, and a well stocked fridge. I enjoy staying in and listening to music or audio books, watching TV, reading, and just being cozy and comfy in my own space. That type of life, however, keeps me trapped in a bubble where my imagination is only plugged into books, games, and TV. Not into real life and real connections.

With graduation coming up and school ending, I am so ready to give time and space to getting out of my place more and spending time volunteering, talking with people, and not so wrapped up in my studies and work. I need to break my imagination in and refill it with weird, unique, and interesting moments.

Here’s how I’m going to break my imagination in over the next few months:

• Attend talk sessions at my local library

• Remove my TV from my apartment

• Rearrange my space to be one of reading and gathering

• Joining my local game developers group

• Attending improv and story game sessions in my local area

• Volunteer with local organizations

• Attend local music, comedy, and shows in my area

• Engage with strangers more

• Keep going to my local silent book club

• Have more intimate and deep conversations with people in life

If you’ve read How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and are also in the same boat of wanting to break your imagination in, I’d love to know how you want to do it.

Even though Chee later went on to go to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he also thought MFA programs were the death of literature. He even took a surprising approach to applying to MFA programs by sending in a story that was wild and he believed could not exist in MFA culture, “I applied as a cynic, submitting the story I was sure my best, the one I was sure wouldn’t be published, sure they would reject me…The plan was that a program devoted to the creation of minimalist realism would have to reject me and I could go on my way, my beliefs about everything confirmed. But that’s not what happened.” Not only did Chee get into Iowa but he also got accepted to UMass Amherst, resulting in him getting a higher fellowship amount from Iowa, where he decided to go.

As someone who went through applying to grad schools three or so years ago, a part of me wishes I read this before. I submitted a story that was wild but a story that had already been published and was, for me, a safe bet to send. I didn’t take any risks in applying. What I got from Chee’s essay is to trust your gut and write the story that is you and yours. Don’t worry about anything else, but definitely don’t worry about being safe.

Even if I didn’t use this approach during my grad application process, I will moving forward. Instead of sending the safe pieces in to magazines, grants, fellowships, and residencies, I’ll send the piece that is just mine and may feel too out there but also feels alive and like the type of work I want to be doing.

There is a whole essay 'The Writing Life’ that gets into Chee’s time working with Annie Dillard that rendered the most writing exercises and lessons in the book. Like this piece on descriptive writing as told and remembered by Chee:

The essay is filled with these very stern and direct declarations on writing from Dillard, but they also aren’t wrong. There is an extreme exercise that is meant to elevate a story from okay to amazing by cutting out every sentence that is the best sentence in the story. Then the writer is meant to write toward those sentences using other great sentences.

My favorite exercise that Dillard suggests is this one:

What a way of giving yourself some inspiration and fire to keep writing, but actually marking a space for yourself on the shelf. It’s like making a promise with the bookshelf that you will see it later.

The end of the memoir closes on a sad but uplifting note. Chee does not directly state what is going on in the world, but he alludes to Tr*mp’s presidency and election having a hard impact on his writing students (and the world). He feels the helplessness and recalls other moments where tyrants took power with a mad glee of destruction. He does not shy away from the fact that it is easy to turn away from the craft of writing during these moments.

But Chee challenges us to stick with writing. To stay in the game, listening, and writing, and fighting back with our words.

Thanks for reading this long article about Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. If you haven’t read this book, I’d suggest it for any author who is trying to write something true, weird, and uniquely your own. It helped me see how I can better connect with the world around me.

Interested in Joining the Book Club?

Subscribers: Let me know by liking or commenting on this. I’ll set up a chat for us to decide meeting times for July’s book Push the Wall by Frank Miller.

Non-subscribers: Subscribe to Writing Skins. As of right now the book club is free to join and participate though some bookish posts will be paywalled!

Subscribe now

Writing Skins is a reader supported newsletter for readers of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and good books of all genres. Book Club is exactly what it sounds like: book lovers reading books and talking about them together.

Welcome to the first actual, official, really real author memoir post! As I read through this month’s book, I thought a lot about what made me want to read author memoirs in the first place.

I started intentionally reading them a couple of years ago (right around the time I started applying to grad schools and became deeply focused on honing my craft in order to expand it in ways I couldn’t articulate beyond ‘I want to be a better writer’. I had reached a point where every craft book I picked up was simply a regurgitation of what I had already learned from another book or class or workshop or article. I love learning and growing my craft through reading, so I didn’t want to just stop reading craft books.

I wanted to replace craft books with something else—though I did just pick up some craft books this past week at Orca, my local co-op indie book store. At first, I turned to books that were closely related to what I wanted to learn. If I wanted to get better at description, then I’d read nature and cookbooks where the writing is naturally descriptive. That was helpful, but it didn’t have the same inspiration and magic of craft books.

If you’re a writer, you may know what I mean. There’s this fire or heat to craft books. Even though I don’t buy craft books as much anymore, I do still go to the section in the bookstore because just seeing a book on writing makes me want to write and makes me want to learn. Essay collections, nature books, and cookbooks, don’t really have this effect on me, even if I am reading those books for research.

When I started picking up author memoirs as I came across them in thrift stores and during my studies at Bennington, they had another type of magic to them. Author memoirs get the process of building a creative life along with that of a regular one where the world is fucked up and heartbreaking and you still have to do the dishes and take your pets to the vet. They feel more inspiring than craft books because they remind us that authors of all levels struggled the way we struggled and still pursued their craft.

There is also a skill to reading these books for the craft lessons. And that’s because most of them aren’t about teaching the reader lessons. They are about how the author learned their own specific lessons about life and writing. Every writer is told to read Stephen King’s On Writing one of the most famous writing memoirs. On Writing is a great starter to reading author memoirs because King just out right says what he believes makes his writing good. Other author memoirs don’t really do this. Readers have to glean lessons from the author’s life events.

In Samuel R. Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water, there are a few direct moments where Delany talks about writing and what makes a good story, but for the most part, his memoir isn’t about teaching you how to write but about how he learned to write and live and love.

In his recounts of growing up and moving to NYC with his partner (poet and translator Marilyn Hacker), selling and writing his first four novels, and sleeping with potentially over 200 people over the course of these years, his lessons come at you like a whisper that turns to a shout. I’ve read several of Delany’s works and The Motion of Light in Water reads like the real life adventures of Kid or what inspired his novel Dhalgren. Though he never directly states this, he does call out throughout the book when certain moments—either in dreams or waking life—do end up having a large impact on his book.

Even though I finished the book several weeks ago. I have still been thinking a lot about Delany’s thoughts around writing and his deep commitment to tell stories that excited and challenged him by living an exciting and challenging life. Some of what he wrote rang very true to my early twenties and mid-twenties before I committed myself to writing full time. One thing that marks Delany’s time and connects both his queer life and his writing is his desire to move and interact with the world. Be a yes agent throughout life.

Being that yes agent, led Delany to being forever open to story, idea, and experiences. It also gave him the freedom to explore ideas. He often spent hours during these walks and explorations through the city talking about what people cared about, their lives, books, and sometimes even craft. A lot of those walks, especially in the beginning of their friendship and admiration for each other, Delany took those walks with Marilyn. During these walks they talked about all manner of things and around the first sale of his novel, Jewels of Aptor, the two stumbled upon the idea that a key to gripping and well selling novels, as demonstrated in many published works both classical and contemporary, was to:

While there are a few other key writing observations that Delany calls out, he also notes that during those early years of writing and getting his first novels published, he did not talk about being a writer a lot. He would often hide the fact that he published novels. Some of that reason he states as being because he himself could not believe that he had done it and that they were successful. Other times it was because he did not find it interesting to bring up the subject to people. Around the time his fourth came out, he did start bringing it up to people when they asked what he did.

A few moments throughout the book I found what Delany was detailing as unnecessary to the writer’s process, but after a while, the narrative of The Motion of Light in Water showed itself as being a meandering walk through the author’s personal city of love, sex, and writing. Once that narrative form found its way into my brain, I was able to enjoy even the basic details of him going to coffee shops, walking in parks, or masturbating.

In one of his other books on writing, Of Solids and Surds, Delany talks about narrative rhythm and how your story can take any narrative form as long as the author follows their own narrative rhythm and establishes the rules of that to the reader early. Delany does this expertly in his opening when talking about his father’s death and how he believed that it happened at the same time as several other momentous moments in his life, but historical accounts show that there was more time between the events than Delany felt. He talks of the slippery nature of narrative and history in this introduction and sets the narrative flow of the memoir.

By the end of the memoir, The Motion of Light in Water is more a book on sex and love in Delany’s life with some asides about writing. And it is powerful in its depictions of all these moments in Delany’s life.

A scene in the memoir traces Delany over the course of a day where he moved about the world as a mute without speaking. The account is upsetting. At one point, Delany is sexually assaulted, though he does not use those words and instead describes the encounter as aggressive and rough. What he does throughout this experience is not fight or say no, but continue with what is happening taking it all in as an experience. Reading this scene, what I thought about was the many times I had found myself in my twenties in compromising situations. Enough of those moments I did not just let the moment pass as an experience but in some occasions I did. I still do.

But Delany took this watcher’s gaze so much further. He believes this is because there was a guiding force to his life, steering him away from danger and toward where he needed to be. He used this trust to allow himself the freedom of exploration.

The book primarily takes place in New York with Delany walking around the streets all manner of night and day just to see what he could find and get up to. A lot of these led to his many sexual experiences but most of it was just because Delany had a love of life and the city. When you read any of Delany’s works especially Dhalgren and Out of the Dead City/Captives of the Flame, you can get a sense of how Delany felt the characters role and place is in the story of the world.

If you’ve read Delany’s work throughout the years of his career, you’ll note how important sex and desire are to his stories. The works that he crafted during those early years that The Motion of Light in Water were written, aren’t as heavy on the sex because that is not what he was focused on in his craft. At the time, Delany was inspired and struck by novels that captured the human condition and emotions in ways that were startling.

The McCullers’s book Delany is referencing is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. If you have not read it, you absolutely should! McCullers’s ability to write the human condition in a way that is acute and breathtaking in that book made me stop every few pages just to sit in emotions and writing of the book. There is not a mundane, generic, or cliche description of experiences or emotions in McCullers’s book. Reading Delany’s work is not the same experience as reading McCullers’s but there is one commonality. Delany worked very hard to push past the basic depictions of human connection and internal workings.

While his craft was focused on depicting all manner of humanity in as clear and striking of detail as he could, his life was focused on experiencing all being gay and young in New York had to offer.

Some of the more shocking moments in the book were of how free Delany was with sex and desire. He’d be sitting on benches or walking around and some man would approach him and within minutes they’d be having sex somewhere. There is one scene where Delany goes to a free sex market hidden behind trailers on a public street. The first night he goes after hearing about it, he does not see anything and leaves without talking to anyone or doing anything. Frustrated, he complains to a friend who has been to this place and is told how to actually get the party started. Delany needed to walk into the dark shadows of the trailers during the dark of night and then he’d find a group of men participating in open gay sex in the shadows. So, Delany went back and with a bit of fear and hesitation, he stepped into the dark and found desire. Delany went on to describe the sexual experiences that he had in this area, totaling over 100 sexual encounters. This bravery and commitment to experience his life at the edge or at its furtherest, is what fuels his writing.

What can be learned from Delany’s encounter at this orgy, or at least what I learned, is that fear is there among the immense and very real unreal moments of life. But we must move forward into that moment and past the fear. Then we’ll be in the moment, which is neither good or bad but great. What does this have to do with writing? For me, this experience screamed to write the fearful thing and move forward into it.

Subscribe now

At one point in the novel, Delany stops for a moment after describing some gay group sex or anonymous sex or both and thinks on why he’s spending so much time talking about his sex life and he mentions that it has a lot to do with AIDS. Depicting what it was like before the virus was important. In another scene, Delany and some friends are talking, some are straight and others gay or queer. The queer folk tell the straights that they don’t really understand the freedom of queer sexuality and romance that being a gay man provides them.

They argue that while straight people have a whole escalator or protocol system for getting together and settling down, for gay men, it isn’t that pretentious or restricted. Within 15 minutes of stepping outside, a gay man could find someone to have sex with or even fall in love with for a few hours or years. Delany mused that it would take less time in his experience. Another friend commented that sometimes age and appearance made that time longer—again Delany thought that no matter the appearance or age of a gay man there was always another man out there waiting for him.

Share Writing Skins

Delany had a way of living life fully on fire and with curiosity, if not stubbornness that was akin to several other writers whose memoirs I’ve read over the past few months like Ray Bradbury and Alexander Chee.

Reading The Motion of Light in Water forced me to confront something I wasn’t expecting to. An author memoir of someone like Delany easily triggers self doubt around craft and career when you get a sidewalk view of a writer who published four novels before his 30s.

What I wasn’t expecting and what has lingered weeks after finishing the book is how I was forced to reflect on my own relationship with my queerness. Delany had adventures and daring desire. I have, to remix a quote from the book, self-doubt and fear. While Delany used his fire to live. I use my fear to live quietly away from the things I want. There are queer experiences, both sexual and not that I have never experienced and really want to.

Some thing I have only done once in my my life is have an intimate relationship with another queer cis woman. When no one is around to hear, I I put myself down and say that this is because I am not a queer cis woman’s dream. Or that I am not attractive enough to get their attention, but deep down I know that’s a lie. A lie I tell myself to keep myself in a very specific and particular cage—it is one probably familiar to many queer people. It is not my lie, though, and it is not my cage. It is all the times anyone has ever called me ugly or butch or a dyke.

But when I use those terms for myself they are never in demeaning ways. Like when I call myself an ugly bitch in my head, it’s often in a hyped up way, a come and try me way. I’m ugly like Queen Latifa in Set it Off. Who isn’t ugly in that movie at all and is intense and in your face.

When I get butchy, it’s a style, an outfit like being pretty or fem or beautiful or handsome or whatever. And calling myself a dyke has often felt more like a badge than a cage. Delany’s memoir made me ask myself what would my life, career, and heart be like if I lived it like myself? Which is also a question my therapist a few years ago asked me, but I tucked that away in that box we all tuck therapy sessions away in. The box marked Very Important but rarely gets opened.

That’s such a big question, I don’t think I’ll ever really be able to answer it but if I was to live my life the way I wanted now, I would move to a city or closer to one after graduation and begin focusing on my writing on a major basis, like I used to when I first started writing. I’d land a job that took care of my living expenses and when not working I’d be writing or living.

Due to The Motion of Light in Water, I have already started changing the way I live and write. I’m going out more trying to show up to who I am afraid of being and not allowing that fear to stop me. I haven’t had sex with a bunch of strangers in the street or any sex really, but I have showed up in my relationships not from a place of fear but security and desire.

For those who could care less about sex and queerness and are just here for the writing lessons dear old Chip has to hand down, here are the top writing lessons I learned from The Motion of Light in Water.

When it comes to being a writer, a published and serous writer, all it takes is work. Commitment. Giving yourself over to the fact that writing as a passion and career can’t be done to its extremes without pushing one’s self and work to the extremes. I recently finished reading next month’s author memoir book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee and in it, he also offers similar direction to writers because it was told to him by another successful writer when he was just starting out.

I’ve been creatively writing with a focus on making it a career for over 10 years now. I made the commitment and shift in 2015 and have been leaning full tilt toward it since. In that time, I’ve met tons of writers who were far more skilled and talented than me. Writers whose abilities and privilege made it so that they could reach stardom with very little work. A majority of those writers have since stopped writing and all but given up on the idea of it as a career. The only reason I’ve managed to land as many opportunities, bylines, award noms, and more is because I too have worked till my mind, ears, eyes, and fingers were numb with work.

In my 10 plus years of writing, I’ve failed a lot. I’m not where I wanted to be this far into my career but am also living a dreamy life as a full time author. Some other creatives have said that I take writing too seriously and have a strong sense of obligation and belief in my work. When working with others as a teacher or mentor, I often tell them that taking their work seriously is important. Committing to their work no matter how strange it may sound is how a writer becomes a writer.

A writer is someone who shows up to writing whether or not they’ve been published or have any intent of publishing. A writer is someone who finishes stories, edits those stories, and think about stories.

What Delany is referring to is called diegesis. Diegesis is a narrative voice over in fiction that lays the scene of characters, actions, and thoughts. In novels like Jewels of Aptor and Captives of the Flame, Delany’s ability to transpose action and movement on the page is done in a way that does capture everything in a sweeping motion so that many of his stories have a cinematic quality—though I could never see any studio turning Delay’s works into a movie because they are far too imaginative for any director or writer to capture on screen.

But good writing isn’t about capturing a moment or transposing it, according to Delany and Theodore Sturgeon

The job of the writer is not to recreate but create something unique for the reader to experience. In my class on atmosphere, I talk about how the only real emotional experience or experience that is happening is in the reader. No matter what we do on the page, what we put our characters through, the only ones experiencing these feelings of peril are the reader. It is up to use to make it so the words on the page create this emotion effectively in our readers.

Delany did not go to college for writing or hold an MFA. He did spend a lot of time listening to authors and creators and people in general. That helped him find his author voice and the stories he wanted to tell. While school didn’t play a big part in Delany learning to write in the way he did, one educational craft experience did shape his career and pave the path for him to later get published.

He attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference when he was just 18 on a work scholarship. For people who don’t know what Bread Loaf is, it is the primer early stage professional writing residency for authors. It’s been around for decades (since the 20s) and has helped many authors like Toni Morrison and Joan Didion get their starts. It’s a place where early talent gets to learn and mingle with top industry professionals like agents, publishers, editors, other authors, and more. This past residency at for my grad program as we were meeting with faculty and preparing for graduation and what comes next, I asked how graduates got jobs teaching at the grad program. The response was the director often picks them out and one of his main places to find applicants is at Bread Loaf.

Reading that Delany attended Bread Loaf at the same time while I was also applying for residencies felt like what I needed to hear. So what if I am almost 40 doing this and he was a young sexy late teen and early twenty year old. I am a hot sexy old almost 40 something thing and I can still cut loose on the page. I can still learn to do things anew.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading this long article about The Motion of Light in Water. If you haven’t read this book, I’d suggest it for any author or reader of science fiction or queer writing. It was a wild ride to read and inspiring.

Interested in Joining the Book Club?

Subscribers: Let me know by liking or commenting on this. I’ll set up a chat for us to decide meeting times for May’s book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

Non-subscribers: Subscribe to Writing Skins. As of right now the book club is free to join and participate though some bookish posts will be paywalled!

Writing Skins is a reader supported newsletter for readers of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and good books of all genres. Book Club is exactly what it sounds like: book lovers reading books and talking about them together.

I’ll catch you next month for Chee’s memoir and this summer I’ll be on the Hugo Award nominated podcast, A Meal of Thorns, to talk about Ray Bradbury’s early crime writing.

Then grad school started and my reading focus shifted toward the books I’d be reading for my degree. But! While reading all these books for school, I still continued reading some author memoirs but I wasn’t writing about it or sharing things here for that book club idea.

The Writing Skins Author Memoir Book Club in 2026

The original list for this had 30 books on it, but to be a bit more focused (not too focused or scheduled because I do still have books to write), we’ll start with 7 books and go in this order.

Every month or so, I’ll publish a free essay or annotation of the book, pictures of the annotations and highlights I make inside the book, and other booky things. And at the end of the month, for people in the book club, we’ll do a text or video chat (whichever we decide as a group) having an open discussion about the memoir, author, and our experience reading the book.

The 2026 author memoirs we’ll read:

• April: The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R Delaney

• May: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

• June: Nothing because I’ll be graduating and presenting my thesis so all focus will be on that!

• July: Push the Wall by Frank Miller

• August: Write Away by Elizabeth George

• September: Skipping this month to focus on reading the book for October.

• October: I, Asimov by Issac Asimov

• November: Tibetan Peach Pie by Tom Robbins

• December: Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview

Have you wanted a low pressure book club that exposes you to new authors and thinkers? Let’s explore these writers and how they crafted their careers, novels, and characters.

My hope is that together we can learn and discuss some fun and interesting things about authors who have written stories we love or hated. And maybe it’ll help me and some people see the world in a new way.

Interested in Joining the Book Club?

Subscribers: Let me know by liking or commenting on this. I’ll set up a chat for us to decide meeting times for April.

Non-subscribers: Subscribe to Writing Skins. As of right now the book club is free to join and participate though some bookish posts will be paywalled!

Subscribe now

Writing Skins is a reader supported newsletter for readers of speculative fiction, nonfiction, and good books of all genres. Book Club is exactly what it sounds like: book lovers reading books and talking about them together.