Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 147th installment, featuring Lana Lin, author of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam. - Sari Botton
P.S. Check out all the interviews in The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire series.
Lana Lin is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2025) and Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham, 2027). Her films include The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018) and Stranger Baby (1995). Her films and collaborative mixed media projects (with Lan Thao Lam as “Lin + Lam”) have been exhibited in festivals, art, and educational spaces around the world. She has been awarded fellowships from New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and four residencies at MacDowell since 1996. www.lanalin.com; www.linpluslam.com.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
59. To answer the second part of the question, it depends on what is meant by writing. I was maybe 11 years old when I won some kind of award for young authors. So, I guess I could say I’ve been writing for 48 years. I could also say it’s been 15 years that I have been writing seriously with publication in mind. Or I could say for 5 or 6 years writing is something with which I self-identify, and maybe for the past couple years I have felt like I deserve to call myself a writer. Actually, I’m still working on feeling like I’m allowed to claim that identity, but it’s becoming clear that’s something I want to be able to do.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam, September 30th, 2025
What number book is this for you?
It’s my second solo-authored book.
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam originated not long after I met H. Lan Thao Lam in 2000 and found in their name a rhythmic resemblance to Alice B. Toklas. I would never have had in mind to write my own autobiography, but Stein’s approach provided an entry for me not only to write essentially my own memoir through the voice of my partner, but also to write theirs. I much prefer the idea of a double memoir, or what I have been calling an autobiomythography.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
Autobiomythography? Experimental memoir? Autobiofiction? The first term derives from Audre Lorde’s genre-defining biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. I’m drawn to the way the term encompasses myth and historiography within a biography of the self. My book happily sits between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
I don’t really have an elevator pitch. I tend to stand awkwardly in silence in those circumstances, but here’s a variant on the query I sent around:
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam narrates the intertwined lives of two queer Asian-North American artists as if from the perspective of my life partner, resurrecting Gertrude Stein’s 1933 mock autobiography of her life partner, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Almost a century after Stein’s modernist classic, my Autobiography advances a counter-narrative, centering the two-decade partnership of a former Vietnamese refugee and Taiwanese American suburbanite. Quotidian events such as buying a pair of glasses and eating a mango are treated with equal care as global crises such as 9/11 and the Covid pandemic, leading to a consideration of how the intimate and personal are embedded in history. Threaded with humor, wonder, and anger, it offers a story of love as a weaving together where “I” becomes “we” becomes “I.”
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
A few years ago, when my parents were getting ready to move out, I returned to the house where I spent most of my youth. I spent a couple days in the basement sifting through dusty boxes of adolescent paraphernalia, including stacks of notebooks and homework assignments. I came across a newspaper clipping of “young authors” who were selected to participate in a creative writing camp. I had not forgotten about what I had considered at that time my greatest accomplishment, but I had forgotten that person who had wished more than anything else in the world to become a writer.
Until college this was my greatest dream, and then at the University of Iowa I discovered filmmaking and my application for the Writer’s Workshop never got submitted. It was probably partly because I was intimidated by the Writer’s Workshop and partly because I was smitten with filmmaking, though neither of these reasons is fully satisfying. I still can’t quite fathom what happened. But the practice of writing has never quite left me.
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam originated not long after I met H. Lan Thao Lam in 2000 and found in their name a rhythmic resemblance to Alice B. Toklas. I would never have had in mind to write my own autobiography, but Stein’s approach provided an entry for me not only to write essentially my own memoir through the voice of my partner, but also to write theirs. I much prefer the idea of a double memoir, or what I have been calling an autobiomythography.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
Of course, it was hard to confront myself and my feelings of inadequacy: is what I am saying worth putting out in the world, am I saying it any differently than others have in the past? But probably the hardest aspect was, in fact, getting it published. I don’t have an agent so I tried to get one, which was largely futile. I was told my writing was very moving but unmarketable. I had a couple promising bites, which resulted in nothing. Most of all I received literally no response and it was probably around a year of waiting in total.
The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam narrates the intertwined lives of two queer Asian-North American artists as if from the perspective of my life partner, resurrecting Gertrude Stein’s 1933 mock autobiography of her life partner, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Almost a century after Stein’s modernist classic, my Autobiography advances a counter-narrative, centering the two-decade partnership of a former Vietnamese refugee and Taiwanese American suburbanite.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I ended up using real names except in a couple instances. I sent the whole manuscript to my family and excerpts to friends mentioned in the book. I made changes when requested which were mainly factual details that I or my partner, Lan Thao, had no access to.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
Obviously, Gertrude Stein, and also Alice B. Toklas. Julietta Singh’s The Breaks. Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. Maxine Hong Kingston and Monique Truong for paving the way and doing things with form. Christina Sharpe, indirectly, because her writing matters so much to me.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
The cliché advice I’ve given to students is that nothing worth doing is easy.
What do you love about writing?
I love finding ways to put unexpected things together that turn out to make sense. I want to make people see things differently or see things they couldn’t see without my bringing them together in a certain way. I do this for myself first but then for my readers, and I do or strive to do it in my films and artworks as well.
What frustrates you about writing?
It’s not that writing comes easily to me, but its challenges aren’t primarily frustrating. I guess it’s relative for me because I come to writing from having spent decades making films and art; I come to writing possibly out of frustration in that process because one is dependent upon so many other factors that are deeply frustrating when making films or art: a huge one is economic—the expense of making film or art far surpasses writing; but there is also the constant hurdle of learning and keeping up with technology, needing to rely on other people’s services and skills. The frustrations of writing pale in comparison—one is almost entirely dependent only upon oneself. This may also be its difficulty, but for me at least it’s an enemy I’m familiar with.
What about writing surprises you?
You can actually discover something you didn’t know simply by writing or trying to write about it. This was my biggest discovery about writing—that you get somewhere through it not as a result of it and certainly not in advance of it—and it is still what surprises me every time.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine, or writing at specific times?
I wish it did. I always long for that kind of discipline but I have to admit that I don’t.
Of course, it was hard to confront myself and my feelings of inadequacy: is what I am saying worth putting out in the world, am I saying it any differently than others have in the past? But probably the hardest aspect was, in fact, getting it published. I don’t have an agent so I tried to get one, which was largely futile. I was told my writing was very moving but unmarketable. I had a couple promising bites, which resulted in nothing. Most of all I received literally no response and it was probably around a year of waiting in total.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
For me filmmaking is kind of another form of writing, and I don’t mean that because I write a script for my films. I make what many would call “experimental films” and some might call “moving image art” which could also fall into a category of creative nonfiction filmmaking. I write during the process of making a film—to work through my thoughts and for narration—but the filmmaking itself, the recording of images and sounds over time, and then the editing of that material is akin to creative writing. It’s about collection from the world—collecting observation, perception, feeling—and then assembling it, collaging different sources, connecting disparate experiences and sensations, combining to produce something more than the sum of the parts. In this way my filmmaking and writing process mirror each other.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I’m working on a mixed media art project with my collaborator, H. Lan Thao Lam, called How to Live with Solastalgia. Solastalgia is a term coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the existential melancholy induced by environmental change. The collaborative project will address environmental and climate grief. I am also at the beginning stages of what I think will be a collection of personal or autotheoretical essays called Stories My Mother Never Told Me, whose title is gleaned from two collections of spellbinders presented by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963 and 1965.