The Autobiography of H. LAN Thao Lam

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.

Author: Lana Lin
Publisher: Dorothy a Publishing Project
Published: 09/30/2025
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.00h x 5.50w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781948980296
ISBN10: 1948980290
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | LGBTQ+
- Biography & Autobiography | Asian & Asian American
- Biography & Autobiography | Artists, Architects, Photographers

About the Author
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.