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— How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
==I now think of an MFA as taking twenty years of wondering whether or not your work can reach people and spending two years finding out.
It is not an escape from the real world, to my mind, but a confrontation with it==, even if it also felt, in my case, like a fantasy in which it was my good fortune to study with Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Margot Livesey, Elizabeth Benedict, and Denis Johnson, as well as Deborah Eisenberg.
I had left a job, and a man who loved me, whom I loved, to be there.
That’s as real as anything.
==The man and I broke up finally in 1994, the year I finished at Iowa.
He’d applied to the Workshop again during our first year apart, and when he was rejected a second time, it ate at him, and he resented me.
When he canceled our plans to spend the summer together, saying, “You’re going to be the famous one, the one everyone remembers,”== I tried to give him room for his disappointment, but it felt like he was punishing me.
He’s since had a lot of success as a writer, so in that sense he was wrong.
==I think disappointment, and the desire to revenge oneself on that disappointment, can be an enormous motivator.
Being rejected from an MFA program can push you as much as getting in can.==