Transcript of conversation with Amy Tan

Amy Tan: Well, there are two parts of the beginning of The Joy Luck Club, the writing of it. One was that I decided that I wanted to write short stories just do something that mattered to me in a way of an art form. At first I wrote something that was so different from my life about a girl from a different family, father, you know, was a professor at MIT and the mother was a well-to-do, rather bored housewife and the more I tried to get away from what was genuine in my life the worse off the stories were. And finally, when I decided no one was going to ever read my stories, I started writing them from a point of view that was closer to my actual life and, lo and behold, those stories became meaningful to me. You know, that was the great discovery is that if you write something from your heart, even though it's fictional, it provides that meaning that we all want. The other genesis is that as I discovered that I took a huge interest in writing these stories derived, inspired actually, from my life, from my mother's life and to write them from the point of view of my mother. And when I did that, I found myself trying to write in her voice and I could hear her voice so clearly and the kind of things that she was trying to tell me all these years; I still fictionalized them, but what I tried to capture was her voice and her intention and her hopes. And then the stories became so important to me that I just wrote what I felt.