By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gathers together evidence of all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia - the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother - and, for the first time publicly, she writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen.
" In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan reveals the ways that our memories and personal experiences can inform our creative work.
The author reflects on her family's Chinese American legacy, her experiences as a writer, her survival of natural disasters, and her struggle to manage three family members afflicted with brain disease.
A mother and daughter find what they share in their bones in this compelling novel from the bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir.
The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the author of bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.
The "wisest and most captivating novel" (Boston Globe) from the author of the bestselling The Valley of Amazement and the new memoir Where the Past Begins Set in San Francisco and in a remote village of Southwestern China, Amy Tan's The ...
Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters.
Through twists of fate, curses, and just plain human error, they find themselves deep in the jungle, where they encounter a tribe awaiting the return of the leader and the mythical book of wisdom that will protect them from the ravages and ...
Amidst encounters with sharks and one octopus (meetings far less harrowing than those she has with missionaries and ex-lovers over the course of her adventure), Shelley untangles a web of stories reaching back decades, leading her to ...
" In these stories' disparate settings—Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany—the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the Trans-Siberian railroad, ...
In The Art of Misdiagnosis, taking its title from her mother’s documentary, Gayle braids together her own narration of the charged weeks surrounding her mother’s suicide, transcripts of her mother’s documentary, research into ...