The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

<b>Situated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, <i>The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam</i> is an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.<br></b><br>“We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and the self-portrait,” writes Jeanette Winterson about Gertrude Stein’s 1932 classic, <i>The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</i>. By narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, Stein invented a literary form that was both intimate and uncanny, blurring lines of authority and identity as it winds through a story of two women living and loving together through a tumultuous moment in history.<br> <br>Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell another story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration in a differently discordant age. At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Vietnam during the war and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin’s <i>Autobiography</i> draws in subjects as varied as photography, tropical fruit, New York real estate, and queer theorist Eve Sedgewick’s eyeglasses, weaving a landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender in our time.