Setting her ghosts free
Tan’s latest book, a memoir of sorts, is her most personal and revealing yet
Amy Tan is sitting in a ghost chair. At least, that’s what her assistant says they’re called — a set of pristinely translucent seats tucked into a clear glass table to complete the spectral set. It’s a Monday afternoon in Tan’s beautiful, wood-paneled home in Sausalito, where the Oakland-born writer lives with her husband of 43 years and her two dogs. She’s sitting in an expansive living room, which provides a panoramic view of the inner bay.
The transparent ghost chairs are an appropriate setting, though perhaps for reasons Tan’s not fond of. Her new book, “Where the Past Begins” (Ecco; $28.99), is a memoir, a first for her, spilling details about her family and her writing process.
“I can’t bear to look at that book,” Tan says. All writers, she acknowledges, experience this type of self-consciousness, even seasoned authors like Tan, who was unwittingly catapulted to global fame nearly three decades ago after her first novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” became a bestseller, was followed by a film adaptation and paved the way for a continuously successful career as a novelist.
But this book appears to carry enhanced dread. As Tan speaks of writing it, there comes a brief but hanging silence before Tan says, “I don’t know. I mean, what did you think? Do you think this book exposes too much?
“Would you write a book like that?” she asks again in search of relief.
An unintended memoir of sorts, the book was packaged from weekly pieces of writing Tan sent to her editor starting in 2014 for a larger, unspecified nonfiction work. To inspire spontaneity, they made a strict agreement that she would send at least 15 pages a week. While writing, Tan pulled from old bins of family memorabilia — letters, photographs, immigration documents, report cards — discovering forgotten or unknown pieces of her life.
Out came chapters on the inner workings of her imagination, along with extensive looks into her family’s history and her relationship with her mother, who was both a deeply close ally and a volatile figure in Tan’s life. The process was at times exciting, at others traumatic.
“When I was done with it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this thing is going to go out into the public,’ ” Tan says. “It was so raw, so fresh. In many ways, I felt I had been beat up emotionally.”
Visiting these moments, such as the chapter “Genuine Emotions,” in which a childhood episode extricated from visceral memory left her shaking, was not a process of healing, Tan says, but “just some kind of understanding.” Yet an expedited pipeline to publication has allowed her little time to meditate on these raw explorations of her past.
“It’s like being in a car accident or being murdered, or being near-murdered,” Tan says, “and then you have to go up right after that and talk about it.”
The last piece she wrote for the book, “The Father I Did Not Know,” the book’s most difficult piece to write alongside “Genuine Emotions,” was written only two weeks after last year’s presidential election. The chapter traces her relationship with her father — who died of a brain tumor when Tan was 15 and only months after her older brother died of one as well — while she thinks about whom he would have voted for in the election.
Tan has long held a fear of expectations, partially buoyed by a lie her parents told her when she was 6, which she chronicles in the book. Speaking about this new work, the conversation often revolves around her intense aversion to expectations. She compares it to the release of “The Joy Luck Club.”
“That was a time when my life went completely out of control,” Tan recalls. “I was so scared, and I cried on publication day because I didn’t know where this was going to go.”
She is no longer as naive as she was then, but again, with a newly vulnerable work, “I feel like I’m out of control.” Perhaps combating the inevitable reality of its release, Tan is abstaining from a real book tour and doing little promotional work, her “version of retiring” at 65.
Tan has had an inordinate amount of assumptions and analysis placed on her over the years as perhaps the nation’s most-read Chinese American writer. Her books are often lauded and lambasted — and miscategorized, she says — as treatises on mother-daughter relationships and the Chinese American experience.
Tan appears somewhat exasperated at that — more expectations to combat.
“If I’m representative, it’s representative of me,” she says. “A kingdom of me.”
Indeed, “Where the Past Begins” details the autobiographical nature of all her writing. Narratives and characters are built upon her family history, and fictional moments trace back to very real tendrils of what she calls “emotional memory.” But her husband, Tan notes, and other close friends have never made it into her stories.
“They don’t make good fiction,” she says with a laugh. “There’s no tension with good people, unless they die. And my father was in those books, and (his character) died!”
With each new book, Tan hopes to be freer from the aftermath, from needing to talk about herself. “I have a plan to go into obscurity,” she says.
But the writing itself, what truly matters, will continue. She describes the process in terms fluctuating between intense existential dread and the ultimate satisfier of her “addiction to epiphanies.”
Tan recalls a book event she appeared at years ago with other authors, early in her career. There, she solicited advice from writer Don DeLillo.
“I asked him, since I was new at this, ‘Does it ever get easier?’ He said, ‘It only gets harder.’ And he was right.”