Where The Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

Product Description

From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan a memoir on her life as a writer her childhood & the symbiotic relationship between fiction & emotional memory In Where the Past Begins bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club & The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths & inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood confessions of self-doubt in her journals & heartbreaking letters to & from her mother she gathers together evidence of all that made it both unlikely & inevitable that she would become a writer Through spontaneous storytelling she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia
- the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six why her parents lied about their education mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother
- & for the first time publicly writes about her complex relationship with her father who died when she was fifteen Written with candour & characteristic humour Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer's mind a journey that explores memory imagination & truth