Amy Tan: Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir

The original idea for this book had nothing to do with excavating artifacts or writing about the past. My editor and publisher, Daniel Halpern, had suggested an interim book between novels, based on some of the thousands of e-mails I bombarded him with during the writing of The Valley of Amazement. I thought it was a bad idea, but he convinced me otherwise with reasons I no longer recall but likely included words any writer would like to hear over a glass of wine: “compelling,” “insightful,” “easy to pull together.” I plowed into the e-mails to see what might be usable. The earliest were the e-mails we exchanged after we met for the first time over drinks to discuss the possibility of working together on my next novel. My e-mails were not carefully composed. They were dashed off with free-form spontaneity, a mix of rambling thoughts off the top of my head, anecdotes of the day, and updates on my dogs and perfect husband. In contrast, Dan’s e-mails were thoughtful and more focused on my concerns, although they also included notes about Moroccan cuisine. He sometimes responded to my offhand remarks with too much care, thinking I had expressed serious wringing of my soul. After six months of wading through our e-mails, I knew I had been right from the start. This was a bad idea for a book. The e-mails would not add up to an insightful book on anything to do with writing. It could serve as a paean to procrastination. I now faced writing a real book.

Unlike those e-mails, I could not write whatever came to mind for a book and consider it good enough to show. Normally, it would take me a week to produce a page that I felt was good enough to keep. Upon rewriting the book, that page and those surrounding it would be cut. While crafting my sentences, I would be aware that an editor expects that a submitted manuscript will be clean, polished pages. [ ed. note: Not this editor. ] My awareness of this fact would lead me to revise endlessly and self-consciously, steamrollering over characters and the freshness of scenes until they were flat and moribund. That had been a major reason each novel had taken longer to finish. After a year of trying a mushy bunch of other ideas, I finally came up with a plan. What had enabled me to write those thousands of e-mails was spontaneity. If I applied that to writing a book, I would be able to finish quickly. I would not think too far ahead about what to write; I would simply write wherever my thoughts went that day and allow for impulse, missteps, and excess. Revision and excision could happen later. To ensure spontaneity, I made a pact with my editor: I would turn in a piece, fifteen to twenty-five pages every week, no excuses. [ ed. note: I should add, I told my author that any pages beyond the required fifteen would not go as a credit for the next installment. We also agreed on some vocabulary that could not be used during the march toward completion. They were: chapter, essay, memoir (which became my secret), finished manuscript, the new book, and deadline . The pieces of prose became known as cantos, harmless enough when writing prose. ] Since I would have no time to revise, Dan would need to understand that he would receive true rough drafts, written off the top of my head, and thus, they would contain the traits of bad writing, garbled thoughts, and clichés. To minimize self-consciousness, I asked that Dan not provide comments, good or bad, unless he thought I was veering seriously off track and writing a book he would be insane to publish. [ ed. note: Which I have never done. ]

What editor would not be happy to be the enforcer of such a plan? What sane writer would not later realize that schedule to be ulcerating and impossible? [ ed. note: Honestly, it didn’t seem that onerous to me. ]

Even so, I did not miss a deadline, except one. The last. [ ed. note: Technically, she was always a day late, using the excuse of PST, to protest her PTSD. ] It was the Monday after the 2016 presidential election, and I felt lost, unable to focus. For the last piece, I chose the only subject that was relevant to me at the moment: the election and how my father would have voted. When I finished, I had both a book and an ulcer.

I wrote more than what is in this book. Free-form spontaneity had given rise to a potluck of topics and tone. Some were fun, like my relationship to wildlife and, in particular, a terrestrial pest from Queensland, Australia, a newly identified species of leech, Chtonobdella tanae, that bears my name. I also wrote a piece on the magnificent short story writer Mavis Gallant, our conversations over ten years of lunches and dinners in Paris, the last one spent in her apartment, where I read aloud to her for hours after a lunch of blinis and smoked salmon. I also considered using a few pages of cartoons—doodles drawn when I was bored at a conference—which I called “a graphic memoir of my self-esteem.” In the end, as the shape of the book emerged, Dan and I agreed on the ones I should keep. I had only one concern: what remains might give readers the misperception that I am cloistered in a lightless room with buckets of tearful reverie. There is reverie, but the room is surrounded by windows and is so bright I have to wear sunscreen when I write.

Since this is an unintended memoir, I thought it would be appropriate to include writings from my journals. I gleaned entries that reflect the spontaneity and seeming randomness of ideas that characterize how I think. They are also in keeping with the nature of the other pieces in this book. I call the longer, anecdotal entries from my journals “interludes.” I call the shorter entries “quirks.” They are quirky thoughts from the top of the head, or quirky things I have seen or heard, or quirky remnants of dreams. For writers, quirks are amulets to wonder over, and some have enough strangeness in them to become stories.

I added two other pieces that reflect fairy-tale qualities of the fiction I loved to read as a child. They are taken from the heartbreaking bin of abandoned novels. Both are prologues. The first, “The Breaker of Combs,” has become this book’s prologue. It captures the mythic past I grew up with and broke from before returning to it as a writer. The second, “Language: A Love Story,” takes flight from my earlier obsession with linguistics when I was a college student. I got as far as a doctoral program before I realized that academia had killed my excitement for linguistics and had instilled anxiety over how to distinguish myself from the other doctoral students. The linguistic principles cited in this rhapsody are likely out-of-date and incorrect. But I have kept it pretty much as I drafted it twenty-five years ago. I had a special interest in Manchu at the time, a near-extinct language with a wonderfully imagistic and onomatopoeic lexicon. It, too, carries the essence of myth, having once been the language of the Manchus that ruled China. The language was already headed to extinction before the Qing was overthrown in 1911. While revising this prologue for this memoir, I learned from an amateur genealogist that my DNA suggested the possibility of a Manchu ancestor. Of course it does. The Manchu of my book is also the Manchu of my past. Imagination is enough to make it so. You just have to look back. The title of this memoir, Where the Past Begins, comes from the last line of that story. Dan suggested it. I had not even remembered writing it.

Although I gave up on the idea of a whole book of e-mails between my editor and me, I realized their relevance to this book while writing a piece about my mother’s letters. In personal letters, my mother expressed herself differently. She began with events of the day and would then relate a particular situation, which led her to question what had actually happened. That eventually led to tangents, then a looping curlicue line of further thoughts, until she was galloping toward obsession. Only the end of a sheet of paper brought her written thoughts to a halt. I recognize that I do the same in my e-mails, except there is no limit imposed by a sheet of paper. I realized also that e-mails are different because they lend themselves to confession, philosophizing, profanity, and vulnerability. They are intimate because they are not words that would be said to many. They require trust and familiarity. In other words, these e-mails contain the attributes of memoir. Dan’s original suggestion [ ed. note: She is referring to the imposed exercise, I believe. ] gave birth to this book.