Author of the week: Amy Tan

last updated 8 January 2015

Amy Tan’s family has turned out to be a source of unending surprises, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Telegraph (U.K.). Before the 61-year-old California native wrote her career-making first novel, The Joy Luck Club, she long assumed that her life experiences were nothing worth writing about. “That I grew up in a suburb and my parents had friends who came over to play mah-jongg and eat Chinese food—who would want to read that?” she says. “I thought I had to make it all up.” But she knew by then that her mother had been married before, and had left three daughters behind in China when she fled the relationship. Probing further, Tan quickly learned that her mother had many rich stories to tell. “I was so excited,” she says, “I decided it didn’t really matter whether I ever got published—this, in itself, was worth it.”

Tan recently stumbled on another possible family secret, said Kevin Nance in the Chicago Tribune. While visiting a museum not long ago, she came upon a 1910 photo of several Shanghai women wearing traditional courtesan outfits—clothes “identical to what my grandmother was wearing in my favorite photo of her,” Tan says. The realization that Grandma had most likely been a courtesan too inspired Tan’s latest novel, The Valley of Amazement. “I started imagining what life must have been like in a courtesan house,” she says. Though she isn’t 100 percent certain she has her grandmother pegged, the courtesan theory eliminates some inconsistencies in old family stories. “For me,” she says, “inconsistencies are where stories lie.”