Amy Tan begins The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings, a collection of essays that spans her literary career, on a humorous note; she is troubled that her life and novels have become the subject of a "Cliff’s Notes" abridgement. Reading the little yellow booklet, she discovers that her work is seen as complex and rich with symbolism. However, Tan assures her readers that she has no lofty, literary intentions in writing her novels--she writes for herself, and insists that the recurring patterns and themes that critics find in them are entirely their own making. This self-deprecating stance, coupled with Tan’s own clarification of her intentions, makes The Opposite of Fate feel like an extended, private conversation with the author.

Tan manages to find grace and frequent comedy in her sometimes painful life, and she takes great pleasure in being a celebrity. "Midlife Confidential" brings readers on tour with Tan and the rest of the leather-clad writers’ rock band, the Rock-Bottom Remainders. And "Angst and the Second Book" is a brutally honest, frequently hysterical reflection on Tan’s self-conscious attempts to follow the success of The Joy Luck Club.

In a collection so diverse and spanning such a long period of time, inevitably some of the pieces feel dated or repetitious. Yet, Tan comes off as a remarkably humble and sane woman, and the book works well both to fill in her biography and to clarify the boundaries between her life and her fiction. In her final, title essay, Tan juxtaposes her personal struggles against a persistent disease with the nation’s struggles against terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. She declares her transformative, artistic power over tragedy, reflecting: "As a storyteller, I know that if I don’t like the ending, I can write a better one." --Patrick O’Kelley


From Publishers Weekly
Tan's bestselling works of fiction are, in part, based on her own family history, and this robust book, her first nonfiction effort, explains much about where those stories came from and how they influenced her. The collection of "casual pieces" (previously published in such diverse venues as Harper's Bazaar, Ski Magazine, the New Yorker, Salon.com and even PW) covers Tan's childhood in California and Switzerland; her writing career; her relationships with her mother and her late editor, Faith Sale; and, most significantly, the role of fate in her life. Raised with "two pillars of beliefs" (Christian faith on her father's side; Chinese fate on her mother's), Tan finds luckboth good and badin all corners of her life. Ultimately, however, she knows "a higher power knows the next move and... we are at the mercy of that force." As she reflects on how things have happened in her 50-odd years, Tan's writing varies from poetic to prosaic. In an excerpt from a journal she kept during a 1990 trip to China, she eloquently describes Shanghai's streets: "Gray pants and white shirts are suspended from long bamboo poles that overhang the street. The laundry flaps in the wind like proletarian banners." But reading about Tan's adventures with her rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, feels a bit like reading someone else's high school yearbook's inside jokes, as she reminisces about truck-stop breakfasts and late-night sing-alongs. Still, this is a powerful collection that should enthrall readers of The Joy Luck Club and Tan's other novels. B&w photos.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
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 Finalist © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Tan's readers are well versed in the basic elements of her mother's difficult life and demanding personality because her mother and her tragic family history have inspired a great deal of Tan's spellbinding fiction. Now in her first nonfiction book, Tan steps out from behind the veil of imaginative writing and presents a collection of arresting autobiographical essays that elicit a rich spectrum of responses from astonishment to shock, laughter, sympathy, and admiration. Tan tells the incredibly poignant tale of her parents' unlikely marriage, the stark anguish of losing both her father and brother within a year, and her restless mother's peripatetic ways, which caused Tan and her brothers to change schools innumerable times until they landed in Switzerland, where Tan netted the classic bad-boy boyfriend. Questions of memory, intuition, language, inheritance, and storytelling preoccupy Tan as she traces the serpentine path that led her to become a novelist, and recounts her mother's struggle with depression and Alzheimer's. Tan is mischievously hilarious in her reports on the writing life, and intensely moving in the most mysterious and haunting of her musings, her remembrances of the murder of her closest friend and the strange, prescient visions that preceded and followed this tragedy. No matter how much readers already revere Tan, their appreciation for her will grow tenfold after experiencing these provocative and unforgettable revelations. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


The Seattle Times, October 31, 2003
...her fans should consider themselves fortunate to receive such a funny, insightful and frequently strange literary self-portrait.


The Washington Post Book World, November 2-8, 2003
The Opposite of Fate is a collection of occasional pieces, but...it's as entertaining as a memoir.


Marie Claire, November 2003
[a] must-read memoir... Even the most cynical people will reconsider the idea of fate.


The New York Times, November 23, 2003
Tan's novels swim with memories transfigured by the pulse of her imagination.


Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 9, 2003
[Tan has] a voice that makes you believe she would be a wonderful companion for dinner.


Minneapolis Star-Tribune, November 23, 2003
Tan's "book of musings" brims with a warm intelligence that make her occasional tendency toward the precious more than forgivable.


San Francisco Chronicle, December 7, 2003
Tan's readers...will be most interested to learn how these mounting tragedies become transformed into...warm-hearted survival stories...


Statesman Journal, November 9, 2003
Read The Opposite of Fate with an open mind. You'll be charmed.


Book Description
In her first book of nonfiction, bestselling novelist Amy Tan shares her personal philosophy of fate.

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, decorating her house with charms, learning to ski, and living with squirrels, to dealing with three members of her family afflicted with brain disease, surviving natural disasters, 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.


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, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which is now a PBS production called Sagwa, for which Tan is a creative consultant and writer. 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 more than twenty-five languages.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Novelist Amy Tan began her musings by asking how hope changes according to life's circumstances. "And what," she continues, "of the circumstances themselves: Do we believe they are simply a matter of fate? Or do we view them as the Chinese concept of luck, the Christian concept of God's will, the American concept of choice? And depending on what we believe, how can we then find balance in our lives? What do we accept? What do we feel we can still change? In these ruminations, the author of Joy Luck Club finds answers and lessons in everyday actions and attitudes.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

These are musings on my life, including the metaphors I used as an eight-year-old child, sensing books as windows opening and illuminating my room, and the thoughts I had as I wrote my mother's obituary, trying to sum up who she was and what legacy she had bequeathed to me... They are musings linked by my fascination with fate, both blind and blessed, and its many alternatives: choice, chance, luck, faith, forgiveness, forgetting, freedom of expression, the pursuit of happiness, the balm of love, a sturdy attitude, a strong will, a bevy of good-luck charms, adherence to rituals, appeasement through prayer, trolling for miracles, a plea to others to throw a lifeline, and the generous provision of that by strangers and loved ones.

Born into a family who believed in fate, Amy Tan has always looked for alternative ways to make sense of the world. And now, in The Opposite of Fate, her first book of nonfiction, she shares her thoughts on how she escaped the expectations and curses of her past, and created her own destiny. Amy Tan tells of her family, of the ghosts that inhabit her computer, of specters of illness, ski trips, the pliability of memory, rock and roll, and the twinned mysteries of faith and fate. Whether she is remembering arguments with her mother in suburban California, recounting trips to an outdoor market in Shanghai, or describing her love-hate relationship with the CliffsNotes edition of her first book, The Joy Luck Club, her recollections offer an intimate glimpse of a best-selling writer whose own life story is as magical and hopeful as her fiction. With the same spirit and humor 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 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.

SYNOPSIS

Novelist Tan (The Joy Luck Club, among others) presents a non- fiction work sharing her personal philosophy of fate and talking about her life and work. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

The cunning willfulness of memory is a powerful refrain in this book. Tan considers how she, like her mother, became frozen in one frame of time, a slave to her own punishing recollections. In ''Scent,'' she relates how one whiff of a gardenia would plunge her into the ''unbearable grief'' of the year in her midteens when the living room was twice filled with funeral sprays after both her father and brother died of brain tumors. Now, she says, she is submerging those black memories into others of ''an earlier time, of happy expectations,'' when the scent of a gardenia meant ''prom nights and first kisses.'' —Deborah Mason

The Washington Post

In this volume, for the first time, I felt uneasy about my reactions to this woman, as if I were laughing at my Chinese waitress for the way she speaks or at the eccentricities of someone who was extremely depressed. That kind of ambivalence is at the heart of Tan's work, which is comic and heart-wrenching at the same time. And depression runs through the female side of this family, seems to afflict Chinese women disproportionately. Tan reports the astonishing statistic that one-third of deaths among rural women in China are suicides. — David Guy

New York Times

Tan's novels swim with memories transfigured by the pulse of her imagination.

Washington Post Book World

The Opposite of Fate is a collection of occasional pieces, but...it's as entertaining as a memoir.

Seattle Times

...her fans should consider themselves fortunate to receive such a funny, insightful and frequently strange literary self-portrait.Read all 9 "From The Critics" >

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