The Queer Tendency of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

Upon its publication in 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas launched author Gertrude Stein into commercial success and placed her as a crucial figure of modernism. Under the guise of an “autobiography,” Stein wrote about herself and the Paris salon scene through the voice of her lifelong partner, Alice B. Toklas. Almost a century later, Lana Lin—New School professor, artist, and author of Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects ( Fordham University Press)—reimagines Stein’s form with The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy Project, 2025). The child of Taiwanese immigrants and partner of a refugee of the Vietnam War, Lin works with and against the grain of Stein’s embodied memoir, and questions what it means to be a queer artist and person of color living in the West. Through the experimentation of first- and second-person perspective, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam—named for Lin’s partner—achieves a radical use of memory beyond the containment of a single body. In a conversation with Katie Pruden, Lin discusses her writing process, psychoanalysis, Eve Sedgwick, and the amorphous quality of queerness and memory. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Katie Pruden: I read The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam first, and then The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I was surprised when the opening of the books linguistically paralleled one another. How much did you use Stein as a reference point in writing?

Lana Lin: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is the inspiration of the project. I quote it directly in my first chapter, and my chapter titles are lifted from Stein, except I transport Paris to New York and World War I to the Vietnam War and then to an unspecified “After the War.” At the end of the book, I come back to a direct quotation, except where Stein references Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, I reference Stein’s Autobiography. Stein’s weight in the literary world—the fact that she has a seat in the pantheon of “geniuses,” as she self-identifies—is what gives leverage to my intervention. I critique the missing aspects in Stein’s depiction of a personal history that has become equated with modernism. There is this whole field of being that isn’t addressed, namely Asian Americans but also people of color in general, who don’t have a place in that history. My book emerges from my desire to speak against that and insert my positionality within that.

Pruden: Towards the end of the book, you mentioned the idea for writing the autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam had been in your mind since that first walk you went on in Canada together, and it stayed on your mind for the next 20 years. Why do you see this kind of story, which challenges the idea of a singular identity and singular authorship, as tethered to the story of you and your partner and your relationship?

Lin: I both identified and disidentified with the legendary lesbian relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and was particularly intrigued by the method of narration in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, where Stein channels her lifetime partner’s voice, which implies that Gertrude and Alice occupy a kind of plural identity. I was attracted to the uncertainty of this narrational voice, and its suggestion that what we take to be a singular self may not be contained within an individual body. I recognized this uncanny twinning in my collaborative relationship with Lan Thao.

Pruden: The chapter “The War,” which narrates your partner and their family’s experience trying to flee Vietnam and includes their time at a refugee camp in Malaysia, feels so sensory and textural. What was it like for you to write about that time from Lan Thao’s perspective?

Lin: That chapter on the Vietnam War was probably the hardest to write. It was the most laborious for the obvious reason that it wasn’t my direct memory. And it’s interesting—I feel like I might’ve overcompensated because of that. People have told me it’s the most sensory chapter, as you note. I think I was really trying to fill in what it would be like to feel and see and hear and touch in that chapter. Lan Thao was not involved in the writing process, but we would have long interviews. I would do some writing and realize what was missing, and then go back with more specific questions. I took a lot for granted in the other chapters because they were more centered on my own memory. Interestingly, my own memories have failed me immensely, but in the other chapters I don’t necessarily try to fill it in, I might even note it as an absence.

Pruden: You write about Eve Sedgwick’s idea of queerness as a “tendency.” Given that Gertrude Stein’s book was written about her own lifelong partner, do you think this is an inherently queer way to write a story?

Lin: I do think it is a queer way to tell a story. I don’t know that Stein would say that because they were not publicly out, but I definitely think that it is. Stein’s story is not about her partner really so much as it is about herself and her partner’s relation to her, but yeah, this position of speaking through another, I think is a queer tendency. I like that. I mean, it’s queer also because it doesn’t take for granted the sovereign self, that I am transparent to myself and that I am alone myself. Marquis Bey also writes about how we are sent through others, how we are always more than one.

Pruden: So you’re writing about yourself in the third person, and in doing so, you’re seeing yourself through the eyes of somebody who loves you. Did writing in this way change a way you had previously thought of your own story, seeing yourself through this outside perspective of somebody who really knows you?

Lin: I hadn’t quite thought of it as succinctly or directly as you put it, “through the eyes of someone who loves” me. When we write about ourselves, we don’t often—I’m now saying “we”—but I think many of us don’t look at ourselves with that loving perspective. I was afforded not just the distance of the third person but the intimacy of my partner as somebody who, as you say, loves me and can be compassionate and forgiving of certain frailties or weaknesses. So what I see in myself as negative qualities, they might be more generous toward. The literary device allowed me a generosity toward myself. I actually found it very liberating and rewarding. I now worry that I won’t be able to occupy a more direct first person.

Pruden: You mentioned a few times in the book about your psychoanalytic training. Did it play a role in helping you write this book in this way?

Lin: Yeah, it probably wasn’t conscious, so maybe on an unconscious level. In retrospect, I have been thinking about the process as a kind of self-analysis. The device of ventriloquism is awkward; as we were talking about, it involves both distancing and intimacy. This somewhat mimics the psychoanalytic relationship, which is a process of both distance and intimacy. But to occupy both the position of analyst and analysand makes it more of a self-analysis. I don’t know how possible that really is; Freud did it, so maybe it was in that tradition, but I didn’t set out to do that. My attraction to psychoanalysis is actually in large part an interest in—it’s bizarre for me to say this because I’ve been so critical of certain kinds of storytelling—but there is a storytelling aspect to psychoanalysis that has always been mesmerizing to me. The first time I heard an oral presentation of a case history, I found it captivating just to bear witness to the evolution of somebody’s life—not only through the occurrences of their life but the emotional trajectory and the psychic terrain that they’re struggling within. In a way, I’m doing that to myself in the book, witnessing my own struggles.

Pruden: In writing through the third person, you’re allowing yourself some version of your memory that maybe you would’ve forgotten or not seen as important to your story.

Lin: That really does relate to psychoanalysis. But one of the things I need to stress is that I never set out with the aim of verisimilitude, I never set out to write a conventional memoir that abides by the contract with the reader that all the events depicted are true. The publisher put a disclaimer on the copyright page, but it still unnerved me, and I asked to add that the author may have taken artistic liberties. When Lan Thao and I talked about the book before it was written, they were fully on board with my fabricating whatever I needed or wanted to. It was important that I didn’t invent anything they would be opposed to, but I didn’t have the goal of being precise to what actually occurred. I hope that the book’s formal conceit cues the reader from the outset that memory is highly subject to construction.

Pruden: Which it is anyways, even if it’s not in this form of writing an embodied “auto” biography.

Lin: What I was getting at is that in psychoanalysis, it’s not so much about what you remember, it’s why you remember what it is that you do and in what forms. It’s not important that what you narrate accurately represents what actually occurred, but the fact that you remember something in the manner that you do has significance.