One of the first things you notice about Amy Tan is the razor-sharp precision with which she talks. The American writer doesn’t use a word out of place, measures what she wants to convey before she says it and at the recently-concluded Jaipur Literature Festival 2018, she managed the near-impossible – speaking on multiple panels with sharp clarity and not the slightest hint of a litfest ramble. Which makes it even more pleasantly surprising that the controlled author is also strikingly open, speaking candidly about everything from the time her mother threatened to kill her with a meat cleaver to how she goes about the process of writing.
With six New York Times-bestselling novels under her belt, and another on the way, the writer is a master hand at imbuing her fiction with deeply personal facets of her own life. Born to Chinese immigrant parents, Tan lived in twelve different homes by the time she graduated from high school, a nomadic lifestyle of constantly adapting to new environments that she says trained her to notice every little detail. She lost her father and brother when she was a teenager and had a troubled relationship with her mother up until her death.
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