Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination

by Amy Tan

Overview

From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan, a memoir about finding meaning in life through acts of creativity and imagination. As seen on PBS American Masters "Unintended Memoir."

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan reveals the ways that our memories and personal experiences can inform our creative work. Drawing on her vivid impressions of her upbringing, Tan investigates the truths and inspirations behind her writing while illuminating how we all explore, confront, and process complex memories, especially half-forgotten ones from childhood.

With candor, empathy, and humor, Tan sheds light on her own writing process, sharing her hard-won insights on the nature of creativity and inspiration while exploring the universal urge to examine truth through the workings of imagination—and what that imaginative world tells us about our own lives. Where the Past Begins is both a unique look into the mind of an extraordinary storyteller and an indispensable guide for writers, artists, and other creative thinkers.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062319302
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/17/2017
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	204,819
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a coproducer and coscreenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California and New York, New York

Date of Birth:

February 19, 1952

Place of Birth:

Oakland, California

Education:

B.A., San Jose State University, 1973; M.A., 1974

Table of Contents

Introduction Where the Past Begins 1

Prologue The Breaker of Combs 13

I Imagination

Chapter 1 A Leaky Imagination 17

Chapter 2 Music as Muse 41

Quirk Souvenir from a Dream 64

Chapter 3 Hidden Genius 67

Interlude Reorientation: Homer, Alaska 97

II Memory In Emotion

Chapter 4 Genuine Emotions 101

Chapter 5 The Feeling of What It Felt Like When It Happened 117

Quirk A Mere Mortal at Age Twenty-Five 139

Quirk A Mere Mortal at Age Twenty-Six 140

Quirk How to Change Fate: Step 1 141

III Retrieving The Post

Interlude The Unfurling of Leaves 145

Interlude The Auntie of the Woman Who Lost Her Mind 147

Chapter 6 Unstoppable 155

Quirk Time and Distance: Age Twenty-Four 176

Quirk Time and Distance: Age Fifty 176

Quirk Time and Distance: Age Sixty 177

IV Unknown Endings

Chapter 7 The Darkest Moment of My Life 181

Quirk Nipping Dog 187

Chapter 8 The Father I Did Not Know 189

Quirk Reliable Witness 220

V Reading And Writing

Interlude I Am the Author of This Novel 223

Chapter 9 How I Learned to Read 227

Quirk Splayed Poem: The Road 251

Quirk Eidolons 252

Chapter 10 Letters to the Editor 253

Chapter 11 Letters in English 285

Quirk Why Write? 312

VI Language

Chapter 12 Language: A Love Story 315

Quirk Intestinal Fortitude 327

Chapter 13 Principles of Linguistics 329

Epilogue Companions in the House 351

Acknowledgments 358

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/28/2017
In this wise and profound memoir, novelist Tan (The Joy Luck Club, etc.), now 65, looks back on her life, illuminating the path that led her to writing. Tan’s fans and writers of all kinds will find her latest work fascinating; she explores how her writing has evolved, and how memory sparks imagination. She also reveals how listening to classical music helps her create scenes during the writing process. Writers will find a chapter of emails between Tan and her editor Dan Halpern to be clever and endearing, illustrating how an exceptional editor helps shape a book and shore up a writer’s self-esteem. Tan also reveals that it takes her years to write a novel, with each more difficult than the last. Woven throughout are tales from the writer’s sometimes traumatic past. Her mother, once married to an abusive Chinese pilot, left her husband and three daughters in China, married Tan’s father, had three more children, and occasionally threatened suicide. When Tan was 15, her father, an electrical engineer and part-time evangelical minister, died of a brain tumor—as did her older brother six months later. Despite hardships and sacrifices, the Tan family held fast to one another, and the “resilience” of love is apparent in these pages. The memoir reveals that, for Tan, the past is ever present, serving as a wellspring of emotion and writing inspiration. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

The best new memoir I’ve read in a decade is Amy Tan’s breath-taking high-wire act of memory and imagination . . . [a] classic of the form . . . A must-read for the ages.” — Mary Karr

“Any book by best-selling Tan is cause for excitement, and this surprising and gripping memoir will be zealously promoted and discussed.” — Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher

The best new memoir I’ve read in a decade is Amy Tan’s breath-taking high-wire act of memory and imagination . . . [a] classic of the form . . . A must-read for the ages.

Mary Karr

Any book by best-selling Tan is cause for excitement, and this surprising and gripping memoir will be zealously promoted and discussed.

Booklist (starred review)

10/15/2017
Novelist (The Joy Luck Club; The Kitchen God's Wife) Tan's second memoir (after 2001's The Opposite of Fate) is a nonlinear exploration of her life, her family's history, and her attempts to understand them as a writer, musician, linguist, and daughter. Each lens she applies to her mother's complexity, her father's turmoil, and her grandmother's actions offers a different way of understanding the past and how that resonates today for Tan. Her family's history is dramatic and captivating, and readers will likely find themselves reflecting on the weight of their own family legends through Tan's thoughtful musings. The email exchanges between Tan and her editor highlight both the writerly discussion about character and plot and the less-glamorous frustrations with formatting in Word that we're all maddeningly familiar with. Tan's tenacity and creativity in trying to understand her parents and their stories is both relatable and remarkable. VERDICT Readers of Tan's novels will enjoy learning about the inspiration behind many of her stories. Book clubs and those who enjoy writers' memoirs, stories about difficult families, or children-of-immigrants narratives will also find much to savor. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/17.]—Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT

Library Journal

2017-07-17
The bestselling author reflects on family, reading, writing, and language in a memoir characterized by "free-form spontaneity."After Tan published her last novel (The Valley of Amazement, 2013, etc.), her editor suggested that she compile a volume drawn from some of the thousands of emails she sent him during the time she wrote the book. It would be "easy to pull together," he said, as well as "compelling" and "insightful." Fortunately, Tan rejected that idea, although she does include one chapter containing a selection of emails between them, some of which offer glimpses of her writing process. The rest of her uneven memoir consists of "a potluck of topics and tone": chapters about her response to music, the idea of genius, emotions, her own personality as "unstoppable," learning to read, and her family. Readers of Tan's previous fiction and nonfiction will find a familiar character: her mother, a difficult, moody woman who had an indelible influence on the author. "The main problem, as I saw it growing up," Tan reflects, "is that she was negative in her thinking. She saw falsity in people who were nice. She saw slights in how people treated her." Bad thoughts festered in her mind until they emerged "in an explosive threat" that blighted Tan's life. A psychiatrist who knew her mother marveled that Tan didn't suffer "from a disabling psychiatric disorder as an adult." But she admits that her childhood experiences made her "intolerant of emotional manipulation." Tan is forthcoming about various illnesses, especially her treatment for seizures with a medication that left her feeling unusually happy. When a friend suggested she stop taking the mood-altering drug, she resisted: "Whatever the medication had done to my brain, I had become protective of my new sympathetic nervous system friend." Tan's candid revelations make much of the book entertaining, but the slight journal entries and short pieces she calls "quirks" read like filler, and many chapters would have benefited from further editing. A composite portrait that should appeal to the author's fans.

Kirkus Reviews