A Writer’s Education

The primary theme that connects all of Chee’s essays is the way in which his life experience instructed his calling and his craft as a writer. Publisher’s Weekly, the main trade magazine of the publishing industry, selected Chee’s collection of essays as one of the 10 best books of 2018, and suggested in its honorable mention that the collection could just as easily have been titled “How I Became a Writer,” a fair assertion. More specifically, Chee’s essays deal with three principle elements of how he became a writer, which include formal writing instruction; the related but peripheral parts of his life experience, like being an avid reader and working in a bookshop; and the purely accidental or surprising elements that ended up being a valuable part of his education.

Chee devotes two full essays to recalling his formal instruction, one as an...