Complete and unabridged
AMY TAN TALKS ABOUT WRITING AND WHY SHE OPENED UP TO DIRECTOR JAMES REDFORD FOR A NEW DOCUMENTARY
and being immersed in reading was a place of safety because I [was] outside of my own reality. I entered one where the troubles are not mine, but I would be involved with them. Once I left that place, those troubles weren’t mine anymore and I went back to my own reality.
I think it helped because it didn’t make me feel as lonely. There were characters who were going through crises just as I was. Writing is a place I wouldn’t call safety always because you have to take a risk as a writer. You have to go into dangerous areas of your mind, your heart, the way you see the world and try to come up with enough in the story that suddenly a truth about it emerges. The truth is not always easy. Truths about human nature are sometimes disorienting and upsetting. It can just throw us off balance. I go into writing knowing that one of the exciting parts about writing a book is that eventually, you get to these truths, but it’s risky to go there.
“The Joy Luck Club” is what people worldwide know. But you’ve written so many bestselling books. Is there another that’s as personal to you?”
They’re all so deeply personal; they’re personal at the moment that I was writing the book. I couldn’t say, “Now I love this book more than the other” because it’s like saying, “I love this part of my life more than the other part.”
I used to say that the book that I love the most is the one I’m working on, but that’s only half true. I also hate that book most. I love-hate, you know, until I’m so consumed by it — the thoughts and the ideas, the elements of the sentences. If I don’t love it, I have to keep working on it. [There’s] a lot of self-consciousness and confusion.
Writing became full of anxiety for you at one point. Can you tell me what you tell your students in your MasterClass session about being able to weave in your emotions in terms of writing?
It’s about memory, fiction and imagination. I do say in the MasterClass that you’ll encounter blocks where you just can’t go. You’re anxious; you’re feeling like this is the end of the world. You’re not a writer. You want to give up writing. Well, I’ve been a published writer for many years, and those are my feelings. It’s normal to want to make things as good as possible. And you’re going to feel anxious unless you have such an overblown ego that you think everything that you write is absolutely true.
I think anxiety just is part and parcel of being a writer.
When other authors are talking about how inf luential you are, what goes through your mind?
This is a really terrible one: that I’m dead and they’re talking about me in religious terms. It’s kind of strange to me. It’s because I have a different sense of myself than I think most people would have who didn’t grow up with me like my best friend. When I’m seen as a writer of an elevated status, that seems like a fictional character.
It is gratifying. And to be honest, disorienting. I have to kind of shift myself and keep in mind my perspective that I’m still the same person and then also be grateful that somebody thinks I’m better than I am in this other context.
In that vein, how hard was it for Redford to persuade you to do the documentary? Seems it might have been a tough sell.
It was actually running up against my goal, which was to enter into a path of what I jokingly called “the path to obscurity.” I’ve been very comfortable with the idea that one day I get to be a lot more private and that people are not going to ask to interview me.
But [Jamie and I] were friends to begin with. We had already talked about so many things related to another documentary. I just remember standing on my veranda looking at trees and talking about life and about trauma, pain, survival, resilience. Finally, after he literally courted me for a period of time, bringing me sandwiches for lunch and, you know, “If you don’t want to do it ... Can I just show you? I’ll never say that again.” Blah, blah, blah. Finally, I decided that we’d talked about this so much, I really trust him. I just had to say to myself, is this going to be worth doing it, having conversations with Jamie and looking at his creative ideas for doing this? I decided yes.
There was another reason, and that is because I knew he was very, very sick and he had talked openly, admitting that he could die.
I told him, “You don’t need any more uncertainty in your life.” And I said, “Go ahead and do this.” No hesitation.
He had the whole documentary mapped out and he said, “Don’t worry, it’ll be done.” And I said, “Jamie, I’m not worried about the documentary at all. I worry about you.”
Now, if I hadn’t known Jamie, if I didn’t have that level of trust in him, I wouldn’t have done it. Because you open yourself up so much to who you are and your family, everything. The archives, my photographs.
[Having done] this documentary thing, it’s clear to me now that all these parts of my abilities and my obsessions as a writer, that they are very much related to my emotions.
What I think that a lot of people may be getting from this documentary is that they say, “Hey, what about my life? The life of my parents and my parents’ parents before that? And how does that all continue or transmute over the years, over the generations? How did I become who I am?”
Last question is the obligatory one nowadays: How have you fared during this pandemic?
I feel lucky every day because I’m not homeless. I’m not worried about paying my rent. I don’t have the kind of job where I have to show up someplace or I don’t get paid. So it was not a terrible burden for me to stay home every day. I watch birds. I have, right there on the other side of this screen, just a backyard full of birds flying everywhere. I draw as well when I want to be outside of my head and into nature.
Something weird that’s happened, I think, for many people is an awareness of time that gets skewed. It’s as though time has become one moment of time. It’s just stuck. And so I often don’t know what day of the week it is or anything and it’s just so discombobulating.
It also comes with this thing about looking at the length of my life. This may sound really gloomy, but I think about death every single day. And I know a lot of writers do so. This is not a depressive notion — I’m going to die. This is the notion that life is finite and that I have a finite number of years because I’m now 69. And you look at that and that makes a difference.
Like I went to buy a new mattress. Somebody said, “Oh, and this one’s good for 20 years, or has a lifetime warranty.” And I said, “20 years?!”
So it’s just, you know, the strangeness. I got to work on a lot of political campaigns. I tried to keep myself doing meaningful things during this past year, eating at home, my husband cooks for me. We had home-cooked meals every day, which was wonderful.
This remainder of my life may still seem like a number of years, but look what happened during this one year. And it went by like no time at all.