Off the page
In one of her first letters to her new editor, Ecco Press founder Dan Halpern, Amy Tan wrote, “Since you’re now my editor, I will subject you to my mulling around, which, as you will discover more and more, is like making my way through labyrinths and forking paths.”
Tan’s new book, “Where the Past Begins,” was originally going to contain only the lively correspondence between Tan and Halpern as they worked on her novel “The Valley of Amazement,” but Tan wisely decided to broaden the scope of her book into something more suitably labyrinthine and forking — a collage of journal entries, letters and meditations on a wide range of subjects, from writing and memory to music, language and family.
Fans of Tan’s fiction will love how she reveals some of the dramatic family stories behind “The Joy Luck Club” and Tan’s other best-selling novels, but the biggest revelation here is what Tan calls her “pinball mind” in all its quirks and reveries. “I hit a pinball, it goes off in angles, then I hit it again. It is endless,” she writes.
Tan is fascinated with the human mind. The brain becomes a focus throughout the book, as it has been throughout her life. When she was 6, her parents launched their campaign for her to become a brain surgeon
because “the brain was the most important part of the body, and that’s why brain surgeons were the smartest and the most respected.” When she was 15, Tan’s older brother and father died of brain cancer within five months of each other, throwing her family into chaos.
Her brain has encountered its own chaos, as well — Tan had to relearn how to use language after a car accident left her with a brain injury while she was working toward a doctorate in linguistics (in a program that had already come close to killing her love of words); more recently, Tan has faced seizures and visual hallucinations from brain lesions caused by Lyme disease.
These experiences serve to draw her all the more deeply into research about the brain and creativity, the brain and emotion. As much as she loves this research, however, Tan’s primary guide to understanding how her own writing brain works is her intuition.
“The fictional mind can take me to what it knows and bring that knowledge to the surface and onto the page,” she notes. “Obviously I can’t prove how the fictional mind works with conscious and subconscious memory, but I have a hypothesis and it is based on my intuitions of how it works for me . ... Its modus operandi is to allow, ‘Whatever comes to mind.’ Instead of sticking to what really happened, it improvises. It requires that I let go of logic, assumptions, rationale, and conscious memory. I am guided by intuitions and as I put together the story, the origins of those intuitions return, and not just as distant memory of what happened, but as if I am going through the moments and the heart-pounding suspense as it happens.”
Tan brings the reader directly into those heartpounding moments of creation throughout the book. She explores how her mind crafts narratives when she hears music, then draws us into one of those narratives as if we’re watching it unfold with her inside her skull. She later leads us through an “in-the-moment exercise” where she crafts a powerful scene set at an 8-year-old’s birthday party, a scene not directly taken from her life, but one that, she is certain, must have some sort of “emotional match” in her past.
Farther on, she tries to recover a painful memory by getting it onto the page, a story that makes her heart pound even before she starts to write it, a story about a moment when her mother tried to throw herself out of a moving car, a story she writes in the third person to try to detach herself from it (“the girl looks at her weak fists and tells herself: Don’t forget this day. Remember what she did to us”), a story that leaves her shaking for an hour. The reader is similarly affected, pulled into Tan’s wrenching rediscovery in real time.
Some of the most moving passages in “Where the Past Begins” are centered on Tan’s mother and their profound, sometimes volatile, relationship. While the two had trouble understanding each other over the years, they meet in a place beyond language at the end of Tan’s mother’s life.
“Our primary language was emotion,” she writes, “the touch of my hand on hers and her hand on mine. ... Take out the words, and the meaning was still there.”
Tan’s memoir can seem a bit shaggy around the edges, a bit slapped together in places, but that feels true to how her mind works. She states that she wanted the whole book to capture the spontaneity of her emails to her editor, the “elasticity and willingness to accommodate whatever comes along” in her imagination. And it does; it also captures her humor, her compassion, her stunning facility with metaphor, her deep sense of wonderment.
In his response to her early email, Halpern let Tan know he was “happy to be subjected” to her “mulling around”; with “Where the Past Begins,” Tan’s readers will be, too.
Gayle Brandeis’ memoir, “The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide,” will be published by Beacon Press in November. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com
Tan broadened the scope of her book into something more suitably labyrinthine and forking — a collage of journal entries, letters and meditations.