Jonathan Alexander, Chancellor’s Professor of English and informatics at UC Irvine, has spent most of his career writing about writing. He studies “how people write, how people learn how to write, how they use different tools to write,” he explains. His scholarship at the intersection of language and technology has made him a leader in the field.
But for the past decade or so, he has also been moonlighting as a memoirist. His personal writing grapples with challenges he has encountered, from homophobia as a kid to a medical crisis in his 50s. Alexander’s latest effort in this mode is a powerful new book, Damage: Notes on a Queer Aesthetic (Fordham University Press, 2026).
Mining personal experience
Alexander grew up in New Orleans, and in 2005, his father died in the evacuation prompted by Hurricane Katrina. This traumatic event initially spurred Alexander to consider writing in a more autobiographical vein.
He was particularly drawn to a subgenre known as auto-theory, which blends the personal and the critical. For example, he was inspired by the acclaimed writer Maggie Nelson, whose auto-theoretical work he had taught.
Alexander’s own life offered many avenues to explore, he says: “What was it like to grow up in the Deep South? What was it like to come of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to have a sense of my own emerging queerness at the time?” This period also saw the height of the AIDS epidemic, which had a profound effect on him as well.
“All of those very personal experiences weren’t really just about me,” he reflects. They could serve as an opening to probe larger social phenomena. “Personal experience,” he realized, “can be used as a way to understand and then critique systems and structures.”
In time, he published three memoirs: Creep (2017), Bullied (2021) and Dear Queer Self (2022), which he considers a trilogy about his family and youth. He also wrote a fourth, Stroke Book (2021), about a stroke he suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, he found himself contemplating how past abuse and trauma had led him to develop habits that, in turn, may have precipitated the health crisis.
He sees his new book, which also explores themes of shame and woundedness, as a kind of culmination of that series of memoirs. In reflecting on those books, he noticed a common thread: “How does one live with a set of damages that one experiences?”
Beyond the self
Although writing in a personal vein was not new for Alexander, Damage does depart from the previous memoirs in other ways.
This time, he also includes his meditations on the work of five queer artists: Hervé Guibert, a French writer and filmmaker who documented his battle with AIDS; Mark Morrisroe, a white working-class man from Massachusetts who photographed himself and his friends; Laura Aguilar, a Chicana lesbian who took self-portraits in the Southern California desert; Carlos Martiel, an Afro-Cuban performance artist; and Catherine Opie, whose provocative photographs are famous throughout the art world.
Alexander had never previously written a book about visual art (though he had written short articles). He was intrigued by its ability to capture another dimension of his project’s themes beyond language. And he has always been an art lover. “I am a huge fan of museums and galleries,” he says. “When I need to detoxify, I go into LA and wander from gallery to gallery.”
In Damage, images of work by these artists are interspersed with Alexander’s commentary. For example, he discusses a striking photograph by Aguilar, in which her naked body is draped over a rock in a desert setting.
Aguilar had a “large – sometimes called Rubenesque – body,” Alexander writes. To some viewers, he notes, her body “would seem like a ruined body, damaged, one whose largeness is the sign of a life mishandled.” He goes on to propose that the “real ruin” is “the legacies of colonization, imperialism, and economic disparity” that might have contributed to her health struggles. Yet that still seems too simple. “For that body is, well...beautiful. It folds, inviting caresses, even if only caresses of the eye.”
“It is ruin and not,” he concludes, “and no easy synthesis is possible.”
Alexander applies this kind of reading – sensitive, sympathetic and attuned to complexity – to all of the artists he considers. One of his aims was to show readers that a beautiful tradition of queer art practice exists, and that making art can be a method of survival.
He was also inspired to follow in their footsteps: he presents several photographs of his own body in the book.
Asserting complexity
The choice to reveal intimate details, both in images and words, can be daunting, Alexander acknowledges. But the reward comes when he hears from grateful readers. They often tell him that they thought they were alone in feeling a certain way.
He wants to push back against a social-media culture that selectively presents a perfect, airbrushed picture. Instead, he offers glimpses of a life that is much messier and more complex.
While Alexander welcomes the celebration of queer culture that is manifest in pride parades and similar initiatives, he is seeking to reassert complexity in that context as well. “I do worry that queer visibility can sometimes be reductive. It’s too easy just to say, ‘Well, I’m gonna have fun and have pride.’”
He argues that, despite the desire for a satisfying narrative arc that ends in healing and redemption, it doesn’t always work out that way. And despite efforts toward repair and healing, sometimes people need to learn to live with damage. “We have to make peace with it. And not expect that the woundedness will ever necessarily go away.”
From damage to care
Alexander currently serves as chair of the Department of English and also co-leads The Wayfinding Project, a multi-campus project that looks at the “writing lives” of recent UC alumni through surveys and focus groups.
Although memoir is different from his academic work, the two are connected. He thinks about personal writing not only as a practitioner but also as an observer of the broader landscape of writing at this moment. Immersion in this genre has influenced his teaching and his analysis of how the personal fits into effective communication.
For his next project, he intends to explore how themes of damage also apply to our planet. In the ecological context, too, we need to reckon with harm that in some cases may be beyond repair.
Recognizing one’s own woundedness, Alexander believes, can be an invitation to recognize that of others. “That may be an important beginning of an ethical relationship, where I begin to see that it’s not just me, it’s other people as well. Here’s how other people have been harmed or hurt.” And then, he adds, “we can start from there to build communities of care.”
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