The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam

Lana Lin

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Paperback

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English

Dorothy, a publishing project
30 September 2025

Biography: general

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.

Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction

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.

By: Lana Lin
Imprint: Dorothy, a publishing project
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 178mm, Width: 140mm,
Weight: 369g
ISBN: 9781948980296
ISBN 10: 1948980290
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 30 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.