New York Review Books

The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam - Lana Lin

Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.?We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait,? writes Jeanette Winterson about Gertrude Stein?s 1932 classic, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. By narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, Stein invented a literary form that was both intimate and uncanny, blurring lines of authority and identity as it winds through a story of two women living and loving together through a tumultuous moment in history. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein?s project to tell another story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration in a differently discordant age. At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao?s life journey from Vietnam during the war and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin?s Autobiography draws in subjects as varied as photography, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and queer theorist Eve Sedgewick?s eyeglasses, weaving a landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender in our time.

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