When Amy Tan took spoke at last week as part of the Post-News Pen & Podium series, she was armed with the CliffNotes for her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, and a little dog in an enormous purse. The dog—a marvel of obedience—didn’t emerge from the bag until three-quarters of the way through her talk, when Tan pulled him out and held him for while. The CliffsNotes served as both comic relief and provocation for Tan to tell the story of her life.
According to the CliffNotes for The Joy Luck Club (which Tan swears she first encountered at our own Tattered Cover) Tan had a relationship with “an older German man who had close contacts with drug dealers and organized crime.” In truth, Tan said, the German was 22 and she was 16, and while he sold a little hashish there was nothing organized about it. Cliff’s version of events was true, but not how Tan would have put it.
She went on to talk about her admiration for her father, and why she rarely writes about him (because perfect characters are less interesting) about her father’s death from a brain tumor and her mother’s subsequent attempts to contact him (Tan was used as a medium, and admitted to fabricating answers on the Ouija board); about her family’s sudden relocation to Holland (her mother concluded from a bottle of Old Dutch Soap that it would be clean there); about the experience of driving around Europe in a Volkswagen, looking for a school that would take her and her little brother; and about her struggle with Lyme Disease, which for four-and-a-half years made it all but impossible for her to walk, write, or remember.
Tan said she turned to writing fiction after seeing a narcoleptic psychiatrist. When he wouldn’t listen to her, she started telling stories to herself. Amazingly, The Joy Luck Club was purchased before she’d even written it, after a bidding war. She wrote the novel in four months.
“I ask myself every day,” Tan said. “How did I get so lucky as to be a writer?” Her answer: a combination of fate, luck, self-will, reincarnation, and having listened to her mother.
Tan’s writing rules (really from the writer Oscar Hijuelos, who gave them to her in an inscription): No TV, No Internet, No Sex Before a Page is Written.
Tan on the experience of whipping Mayor Hickenlooper during a performance of the Rock Bottom Remainders (the band she’s in with Stephen King, Dave Barry, Mitch Albom and others, where she plays the role of Rythym Dominatrix): “He enjoyed being whipped. Not many mayors do, but you have a different kind of mayor.”
-A. R.
