The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

By: Lana Lin

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Synopsis: Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in NonfictionSituated 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 draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, 9/11, and Eve Sedgwick&’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.