The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam
Dorothy, a publishing project, 2025. Longlisted for the National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Order here.
“Lyrical prose, palpable love, and formal audacity coalesce to make this a must-read.” Publishers Weekly, starred review.
“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.” Saffron Maeve, The Believer
“The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam is an object lesson in how to remain in conversation with one’s artistic forebears … Lin shows we can interact with their work with a twinned sense of kinship and of criticism.” H Felix Chau Bradley, Xtra
*
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.
In her 1933 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.
At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin’s Autobiography draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.
*
“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
“A fresh take on a dual biography.” Kirkus Reviews
The Millions Great Summer 2025 book preview
Hotly Anticipated on Andrea Lawlor’s Pocket Hype
Events:
Book launch, Books Are Magic Montague, Brooklyn, NY. In conversation with Monique Truong, 7pm, Oct 1
Parapraxis seminar, Psychoanalysis and Autobiomythography, a Romance?, 1pm, Oct 5 (virtual)
Wesleyan RJ Julia, Middletown, CT, in conversation with Lisa Cohen, 6pm, Oct 8
Bol Bookstore, Washington, DC, panel with Chet’la Sebree and Mahreen Sohail, Oct 9 (in person event; Lana Lin participating virtually)
Southern Festival of Books, Nashville, TN, Oct 19
Lesbian Lives Book Celebration, Bureau of General Services Queer Division, 11am-1pm, Oct 26 (in person & live streamed)
The Head & the Hand Books, Philadelphia, Personal Velocity series, 6:30pm, Oct 29
Miss Manhattan Reading Series, Bar Niagara, 7:30pm, Nov 3
First Light Books in conversation with Deb Olin Unferth, Austin, TX, 6pm, Nov 5
Women & Children First in conversation with Suzanne Scanlon, Chicago, 6pm, Nov 6
Miami Book Fair, NBF Presents: 2025 National Book Award Honorees for Nonfiction, 2pm, Nov 22; Lightning Round with 2025 NBA, 6pm, Nov 22; Fifty years after the Vietnam War with Cathy Linh Che and Andrew Lam, 1pm, Nov 23
TYPE Queen, 883 Queen Street West, Toronto, 7:30pm, Nov 27