Author of the week

Amy Tan

Amy Tan found the cure for despair waiting in her backyard, said Julie Depenbrock in NPR.org. The Joy Luck Club author and daughter of Chinese immigrants says she began observing and feeling targeted by open racism for the first time in her life around 2016, and decided she needed to find relief. “I was feeling so much despair that our world was turning uglier and uglier,” she says. “I needed to get it out of my mind.” So, at 64, she enrolled in drawing classes and committed to spending more time focused on the natural world, particularly the birds that flitted through the backyard of her Sausalito, Calif., home. And her plan worked. “It was beautiful. It was in the moment,” she says. “And what better antidote to be in a place of biodiversity as opposed to hatred of diversity?”

In her hit new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, Tan uses words and drawings to introduce readers to her feathered visitors, said Victoria Schlesinger in Bay Nature magazine. To pay attention to them, she says, is to enter a world rich in drama. “Birds afford stories that are tragic and comedic, very dramatic love stories, stories of betrayal—they’re all there,” she says. Tan feeds birds, which knits her into their world. She loves when a bird stares at her and then resumes what it was doing—“which means to me,” she says, “that I’m a normal part of that bird’s world. I’m accepted.” But she knows not to get too attached to any birds she’s watched for weeks or months. “They will desert you,” she warns. “They have no loyalty.” Seeing them move on is both hard, she admits, and one of bird-watching’s rewards. “It becomes a way for people to live more deeply,” she says.