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
Excited to read this! I would 1000% have bought this for the cover alone but Lana Lin is brilliant & I’m excited.
—Andrea Lawlor
A fresh take on a dual biography.
—Kirkus
Taking inspiration from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Lin chronicles her partner Lan Thao’s life and work in this genre-defying portrait.
—The Millions
