Originally published on Everydayebook.com

Everyone has that one book that instantly becomes a favorite from the first page, the one that makes them feel every emotion, from laughter to tears, intensely, and that leaves them with the urge to reread from the minute the last page is finished. For me, this book was The Joy Luck Club. I could, and have, read that book over and over, and never fail to be moved by the story of mothers and daughters, of cultural identity, and of fate and faith. Given my worship of the book and subsequent devouring of Amy Tan’s other titles, I was surprised to discover recently that there was one book I had not yet read: The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life.

This collection of lyrical, thought-provoking and humorous essays chronicles Tan’s life, but not in chronological order. Rather, the essays are arranged artfully to reveal Tan’s life through its influence on her writing. For someone like me – someone in love with her plots as well as her prose – the book is a goldmine. Throughout the essays Tan reveals the themes from her own life that so strongly shaped her work, particularly the mother-daughter relationship. In one essay, someone points out to Tan that almost all her work centers around mothers and daughters, something she hadn’t realized up until that point, and an unsurprising fact, given the emotionally fraught relationship she had with her own (probably bipolar) mother. Some essays, which reveal the manic-depressive and violent aspects of her mother, are visceral and hard to read. Because of this, when you come to an essay like “last week,” and “confessions,” in which Tan reveals the last few weeks of her mother’s life and the healing and love of those days, you might weep involuntarily, keenly feeling Tan’s emotions and the achingly beautiful closure she receives.

Weaved throughout these plot points of Tan’s life are musings on reading and writing. She writes a lot about the therapeutic and exploratory nature of writing. She particularly seems troubled by those who dissect her works in an attempt to extract meanings and symbols. She writes, she says, because she has questions, not because she has some clever answers that she wants to hide in layers of words. Any writer or lover of words will find themselves nodding along to many of her statements throughout the collection. Toward the end of the book was one that particularly struck me: “Reading [is] an act of faith, a hope I will discover something remarkable about extraordinary life, about myself. And if the writer and reader discover the same thing … the act of faith has resulted in an act of magic.” Finally, I understand why Amy Tan has always left me spellbound.