Amy Tan on writing, family, and writing about family

Early in this book’s gestation, Amy Tan thought to call it The Story Behind the Story. That title, though ultimately discarded, is apt in two senses: Tan makes explicit how thoroughly her mother’s and grandmother’s lives saturate her novels, and—for readers more curious about the creative process than about Tan’s family—she examines how the writing life works.

Because much of Tan’s fiction is autobiographical, those two registers are inseparable: to write about writing is, for Tan, to write about her forebears. Tan’s mother, Daisy, whose own mother killed herself to escape life as a rich man’s concubine, married a violent, wealthy cad. She eventually abandoned him and their three daughters, moving from China to America to marry the man who would become Tan’s father. Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, drew so evocatively on the family’s matriarchal lore that Daisy wondered if her own long-dead mother had visited Tan and helped her with it.

But Where the Past Begins does more than rehearse Tan’s harrowing ancestral tales. Recalling Alison Bechdel’s exploration in Are You My Mother? of the frictions and intimacies between a mother and a writer-daughter, Tan considers her fiction as almost a third character in her complicated relationship with her mother. Some parents are horrified when their children write novels moored in family secrets. Not Daisy Tan. Shortly after The Joy Luck Club was published, recalls Amy Tan, a relative