In his first novel, Edinburgh , Dartmouth college professor Alexander Chee wrote about a difficult subject: child sexual abuse. "Part of the reason why I wrote it was because I hadn't seen anything that really dealt with the rage that people feel afterwards, and I wanted to show that in some way," he says. The novel's protagonist was a Korean American boy who, like Chee, was sexually abused. The novel was well-reviewed, but Chee says the most meaningful response to his novel came from a man serving time in prison for pedophilia. "A friend of mine had sent him my novel and he wrote back about how he had not spoken for four days while he read the book," Chee says. "What he wrote to my friend was: 'This was the first thing that ever showed me what I did was wrong.'" This experience — the writing of "Edinburgh" and the responses it generated — are among the personal experiences covered in Chee's new collection of essays. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel explores the difficulty of