Anticipation Friday: Where the Past Begins by Amy Tan

Goodreads Description
In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and 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—and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer’s mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.

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Other info
Expected Date of Publication: October 17, 2017
Stand-Alone or Series/Companion: Stand-Alone
Genre: Memoir

Why Am I Anticipating This Book?

• I have read one of Amy Tan's other books, Joy Luck Club, for school twice and I really liked it. All of her books are full of symbolism and themes, which makes it fun to read and find them all.
• She writes a lot of historical fiction pieces about Chinese immigration to the United States. Her books have a lot of Chinese-American culture in them, which I find interesting. There's often flashbacks of what it was like in China and how different life is as Chinese in the United States.
• I am actually going to meet her at the library in a week and a half where she will be discussing her newest book, Where the Past Begins.