WHERE THE PAST BEGINS
A WRITER’S MEMOIR
Fourth Estate, 368pp, £18.99, Oldie price £12.97 inc p&p Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck
Club, was published in 1989 and has sold more than six million copies in the US alone. Since then she has written six more. Now she has produced a memoir, though it’s not a conventional one, having been spliced together from a long series of emails she sent to her editor that eventually came to include extracts from her journal, personal letters, excerpts from unfinished novels, even a drawing of a cat from when she was twelve.
‘In a way, it’s surprising that it took Ms Tan this long to write about herself,’ wrote Alexandra Alter in the
New York Times, ‘given that her fiction, which often features Chinese mothers and daughters, is full of
family lore and semiautobiographical material.’ The facts of Tan’s life have the hallmarks of an engaging intergenerational saga. She was born in Oakland in 1952. Her mother was a depressive who frequently threatened suicide and once, when Tan was sixteen, attacked her with a meat cleaver. When Tan was still a teenager her brother and her father both died from brain tumours. Tan also weaves in the story of her grandmother, a rich man’s concubine in China who died of a possible opium overdose, and her own tribulations as the child of immigrants and a sufferer of Lyme’s disease.
‘Despite its uneven, somewhat jerky structure,’ declared Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times, this book ‘yields treasure’. All of Tan’s gifts – ‘the ability to layer images, to command your attention, to shock you with a sudden slipping in of the knife’ – are here, even if some of the journal extracts feel ‘random’. Emily Gray Tedrowe, writing in USA Today, agreed that there were longueurs in the book, but felt that they did not ultimately mar ‘the power of this richly varied, thought-provoking book’.