If you’re a fan of Amy Tan’s fiction, you definitely need to check put her writer’s memoir! It’s full of really interesting anecdotes, essays, musings and articles. Sometimes it is a bit repetitive, but I think that’s just down to the nature of these types of collection. A lot of the pieces were published separately, so sometimes there’s unnecessary repetition when they’re all placed one after the other.
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Considering this was published 20 years ago, a lot of her musings on the publishing industry are still very relevant. Tan calls out the onus unfairly placed on marginalised authors to be a spokesperson for an entire race, ethnicity, country, culture, sexuality, gender. For their fiction to be educational, to teach white westerners about lives different to their own. No book, especially no fiction book, can be representative of any given culture since experiences vary so wildly from person to person.
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But then, the downside to this being almost 20 years old, Tan does express some thoughts on publishing which I don’t agree with. Tan wonders if she had struggled to get published, whether she’d believe ‘there was a conspiracy in publishing’ - something she heard from other authors of colour. Well there is no conspiracy, it’s racism within publishing which sees BIPOC authors struggle to find mainstream publishers in comparison to their white counterparts. Just because Tan gained success, doesn’t mean there still isn’t a larger, on-going issue.
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But overall, a thought-provoking, poignant and hugely entertaining read as well! She’s very funny, I loved reading about her shenanigans with the Rock Bottom Remainders, and she balances that with more emotional pieces about her relationship with her mother and her later diagnosis of Lyme disease.