Tan’s memoir is full of vivid stories about her childhood in California, her relatives in China, the losses of her father and older brother when she was fifteen, and the secret of the family her mother left behind in Shanghai. Many of these stories echo details from Tan’s award-winning novels, especially The Joy Luck Club. But here, the stories are dictated by memory, not imagination, and in telling them Tan is doing more than providing backstory to her narratives. Drawing on her own journals and the letters she exchanged with her mother, Tan explores the fine and meandering line between real life and art, and her eloquent book is at once a revealing self-portrait and a fascinating look at how fiction grows from and transforms experience.
Tan will be in conversation with Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of the now-classic You Just Don’t Understand and, most recently, You’re the Only One I Can Tell.
