Amy Tan

Amy Tan is out on the lecture circuit in support of her new essay collection, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. She’d rather be out in support of her fifth novel, but… Well, that’s one of the things she writes about in Fate: her fight against a rather nasty bout of Lyme disease, which has played havoc with her memory and destroyed the timetable for a proper followup to her bestsellers The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. We hope for a speedy recovery, but until then, Tan’s nonfiction makes a worthwhile tide-me-over. She’s always shaped her fiction from her life story, and if Fate is a little chaotic, it also shows us sides of the author not always at the forefront of her novels. She writes movingly about her illness and her painfully complex relationship with her Chinese-born parents, but also about the mortifying experience of having her work turned into Cliffs Notes. She’s also “rhythm dominatrix” for the celebrity-novelist band Rock Bottom Remainders, which apparently involves buttock-whipping Stephen King, Dave Barry and Matt Groening. That’s show biz.
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