Thursday, March 8, 2018
8pm

Amy Tan
in conversation with Charmaine Craig

discussing her new book, 
Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir

The Writers Guild Theatre
135 S Doheny Dr,
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

PURCHASE TICKETS 
$55  Reserved Section Seat + book
$45  General Admission + book
$20 General Admission seat
A book signing follows the event
 

Amy Tan is the author of The Valley of Amazement, The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa the Chinese Siamese Cat.  Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club and the librettist for the opera The Bonesetter’s Daughter.  Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Her work has been translated into thirty-five languages.

Charmaine Craig is the author of the novels Miss Burma, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Good Men, a national bestseller. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Narrative Magazine, among other venues, and on PBS NewsHour. Formerly an actor, she grew up and resides in Los Angeles, and teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.  Charmaine Craig appeared at Live Talks Los Angeles in conversation with Jane Smiley in 2017 for her book, Miss Burma.

In Where the Past Begins, Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. 

Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia—the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother—and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer’s mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning.