In-Store: Lana Lin: The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam w/ Monique Truong

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/8_fAjTk-Rfg
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

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 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.

Lana Lin is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of the book Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer and film and video works including The Cancer Journals Revisited. Her various works and collaborative projects (with Lan Thao Lam as “Lin + Lam”) have exhibited at festivals and art and educational spaces throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and New Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gasworks, London; the Taiwan International Documentary Festival and Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, New Taipei City; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul; and the 2018 Busan Biennale. Having had three years of psychoanalytic training before dropping out, she sometimes still dreams of becoming a psychoanalyst one day.

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She’s a novelist, essayist, children’s book author, and librettist. Her novels are The Sweetest Fruits (Viking, 2019), Bitter in the Mouth (Random House, 2010), and the national bestseller The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), with German translations published by C.H. Beck. Her children’s picture book Mai’s Áo Dài (Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2025) is co-written with Thai Nguyen and illustrated by Dung Ho. A graduate of Yale College and Columbia Law School, she’s received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hodder Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, Young Lions Fiction Award, Bard Fiction Prize, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors.

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