Amy Tan mines her painful ‘Past’ in memoir
How does a writer blend imagination with memory? What happens when a story writer unearths painful emotions about the past? Amy Tan’s new book Where the Past Begins (Ecco, 357 pp., eeeg) carries the significant subtitle, A Writer’s Memoir.
In it, the author, best known for The Joy Luck Club, reflects on a life’s work that has combined imagining and remembering.
Where the Past Begins pieces together ideas in a mosaic-like structure, moving from essays about Tan’s newfound love for nature drawing, to family history traced through photographs, to a collection of letters between Tan and her editor, Daniel Halpern, to whom the book is dedicated.
Tan provides generous insights on what a professional writer’s life looks like — although newer writers might be unhappy to learn that even for an author with Tan’s success, “each book since (her first) has been increasingly difficult to write.”
Another standout chapter traces her unwitting participation in a 1960s psychological experiment about children able to read early. Funny and touching, it allows Tan to investigate how their half-truths affected her path toward becoming a writer.
But the memoir’s dark heart is in the anguished stories about Tan’s family. When she was 15, her father and her brother died of brain tumors within a year.
The losses unhinged Tan’s already emotionally unstable mother, leading to erratic decisions and violent scenes. As Tan works through her memories of the many times her mother threatened suicide and harm, the book takes on a somber tone.
For Tan, the vexed relationship with her mother is a central one, “an emotional seesaw of fights followed by declarations of love … when we were not at battle, we each understood the other deeply.” As she re-creates the time her mother tried to fling herself out of a moving car, all three young children in the backseat, readers will be stunned by what Tan survived and how she transformed so much of that pain into art.
Not all of the book’s material works: Several shorter digressions come off as disconnected filler. And at times repetition across essays creates frustration rather than the recursive meditation that may have been intended.
Such minor detractions hardly mar the power of this richly varied, thought-provoking book. Where the Past Begins will surely gratify Tan’s many fans, and likely win her numerous new ones.