Amy Tan was born into a family that believed in fate. In The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, she explores this legacy, as well as American circumstances, and finds ways to honor the past while creating her own brand of destiny. She discovers answers in everyday actions and attitudes - from writing stories and decorating her house with charms, to dealing with three members of her family afflicted with brain disease and shaking off both family curses and the expectations that she should become a doctor and a concert pianist.
With the same spirit, humor, and magic that characterize her beloved novels, Amy Tan presents a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we face today, contemplating how things happen - in her own life and beyond - but always returning to the question of fate and its opposites: the choices, charms, influences, attitudes, and lucky accidents that shape us all.
When a novelist turns to essays, there's a marked reduction in drama. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it's not as thrilling. Unless you're Amy Tan. Her grandmother killed herself with opium. Her mother was jailed for adultery. Her father and brother were taken suddenly with brain tumors. Her dear friend, Peter, was murdered on her birthday and in a manner that had been foreshadowed in her dreams. Another friend suffocated while skiing. Tan herself has escaped death by a whisker again and again. When a clumsy fan asks if she's a contemporary author--in other words, "Are you dead yet?''--we sympathize with the confusion. Confessing, reporting, with a smile in her voice, she is a true-life adventurer you can't help but like and admire. B.H.C. 2004 Audie Award Winner (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which has now been adapted as a PBS production. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club, and her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.
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