Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
    Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
    Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
    Audiobook14 hours

    Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir

    Written by Amy Tan

    Narrated by Amy Tan and Daniel Halpern

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan reveals herself in a way she never has before, delving into her childhood, adolescence, family history, beginnings as a writer and professional life to explore the answers to questions of purpose and meaning that we all ask ourselves as we get older.

    Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal-writing and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist’s fiction. Interspersed with direct correspondence between the author and her editor, this audiobook will give fans and critics unparalleled insight into the author’s process, her thoughts on the literary enterprise, and her singularly warm, intelligent mind.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9780062694751
    Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
    Author

    Amy Tan

    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, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children's books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a coproducer and coscreenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.

    More audiobooks from Amy Tan

    Related to Where the Past Begins

    Related audiobooks

    Composition & Creative Writing For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Edit Like a Surgeon

      Dec 21, 2021

      Most writers know the importance of self-editing their work before submitting it to an editor or publisher. However, even established writers sometimes struggle to understand exactly what the editing process should entail, and how to know when they’r

      6 min read

    • Article

      Samantha Irby On Oversharing And The Art Of Confessional Writing

      May 9, 2018

      Samantha Irby is not shy about her shortcomings. The blogger and author of the essay collections "We Are Never Meeting in Real Life" and "Meaty" writes both openly and hilariously about dealing with Crohn's disease, awkward dating experiences and bad

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Stuff Of Happiness

      Feb 26, 2020

      Growing up, I didn’t have much, so I remember all of it. And that may be a promise of future joy in my life.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Dear Diary

      Dec 3, 2023

      Dear Diary
      6 min read

    • Article

      Revising Your Own History: The Millions Interviews Anya Yurchyshyn

      May 2, 2018

      Anya Yurchyshyn’s debut memoir My Dead Parents is a gut-punch, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yurchyshyn’s account runs counter to traditional narratives of loss: after a fraught childhood and adolescence, she mostly felt relief when her p

      11 min read

    • Article

      This Is Not Stuff, It’s Who I Am

      May 19, 2020

      Yes, I like to keep things. Not just anything – I’m not a hoarder type who lines up empty yoghurt pots by the dozen, or buys a pair of shoes every week to feel validated, but I do think that decluttering is overrated. Simplifying your surroundings so

      3 min read

    • Article

      Adulting in Motion: The Millions Interviews Emma Straub

      May 1, 2020

      I was working to better understand women in my mother's generation—maybe mothers in all generations—mothers who are further down the road than I am. The post Adulting in Motion: The Millions Interviews Emma Straub appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      How to Turn Artifacts & Research into a Family Memoir

      Sep 16, 2022

      For many years I had kept the heavy brass nameplate engraved “S.A. Schneider” on my own desk, but until I was writing my memoir, Missing, I hadn't understood why it was so important to me. Over a hundred years old, that nameplate once sat on my grand

      3 min read

    • Article

      Memorizing and Memory: A Writer’s Estranged Cousins

      May 2, 2019

      Oh, but daddy could speak. His words are emblazoned on my memory. They land on the pages I write—ubiquitous, textured, yet not easy to digest. The post Memorizing and Memory: A Writer’s Estranged Cousins appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      5-minute Philosopher

      Jan 25, 2024

      5-minute Philosopher
      1 min read

    • Article

      James Gray

      Nov 4, 2022

      James Gray
      3 min read

    • Article

      Telling The Ancestral Tales

      Feb 12, 2021

      Telling The Ancestral Tales
      3 min read

    • Article

      Becoming Us

      Jun 23, 2023

      Becoming Us
      3 min read

    • Article

      Inscribed Upon The Heart

      Nov 21, 2023

      Whether the pink diary with gold lettering that I received for my eighth birthday, the brown leather journal in which I compiled teenage angst, pages I filled as a young mother with a growing child, computer files brimming with memoirs, or commonplac

      6 min read

    • Article

      Anything Goes: The Millions Interviews Chris Rush

      Apr 29, 2019

      One of the things the Catholic church prepared me to do was to believe in things that were invisible and possibly even farfetched and totally impossible. The post Anything Goes: The Millions Interviews Chris Rush appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Unshuttered

      Feb 15, 2023

      Unshuttered
      10 min read

    • Article

      Unshuttered

      Feb 15, 2023

      Unshuttered
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Where the Past Begins

    4/5

    58 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Very good and soulful book. Amazing read by the author as well.
    • 4/5
      Sometimes this is tough to read. Amy's childhood with a suicidal, undiagnosed, untreated mentally ill mother. Her mother and grandmother has tragic stories.There are good times too.She reflects on how she came to be a writer.
    • 4/5
      I came to Amy Tan’s novels very late in her career despite having been aware of her almost from the moment that The Joy Luck Club hit the bookstores back in 1989. Even saying that “I came” to her novels is a bit misleading as, to this day, that’s the only one of her novels I’ve read – and I didn’t finally read that one until 2015. But still, Amy Tan fascinates me enough that I recently purchased a copy of her 2017 “writer’s memoir” Where the Past Begins in hardcopy and borrowed the audiobook version from the library in order to hear Tan read her own work. Let’s just say that I was not disappointed and that Tan continues to fascinate me.Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir intimately explores the author’s family history, especially that of her mother. Those familiar with Tan’s novels will already be familiar with the basics of her family tree and how the family ended up in America; even those like me who have read only The Joy Luck Club will immediately recognize several of Tan’s relatives and episodes from their lives. But what they will be reading for the first time is how it really was for Tan to grow up with a mother who often used the threat of suicide to get her husband and children to do what she wanted them to do. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Where the Past Begins, however, is that Tan even decided to share the cathartic process of writing it with her readers, in the first place. It all started for Tan when she decided to explore the contents of the seven plastic bins she kept in her office, bins containing photographs, letters, and miscellaneous memorabilia marking some of the “frozen moments in time” relating to her own past and to her family history (moments from before her own birth). During the process, she learned just how unreliable many of her childhood memories were, and she was forced to reconfigure and reassess the ones she had of her parents. Tan learned who her parents really were. The author pulls no punches here. This is as honest a memoir as one could wish for, one in which its author reveals much about her mentally unstable mother (including one incident in which her mother came at her with a knife) and how the relationship shaped her into the writer she would became. Tan also shares frank details about her father and her two brothers and her relationship with each of them. Not awfully surprising, I suppose, she learns that her surviving brother’s memories of their childhood do not always mesh in detail or in content with those of her own. Amy Tan is figuring out here who she is and how she became that person – and she takes her readers along for the ride.Equally intriguing and honest are the book’s segments on the writing process and how Tan works her way through it to produce her fiction. Tan is not one of those overconfident writers who can speed through the writing process with the full confidence that she will almost certainly produce something worth publishing. For her, almost the opposite seems to be the case, and it is an educational joy to read through the long email exchange she shares here between her and her trusted editor. Bottom Line: Where the Past Begins will interest both Amy Tan admirers and general fans of the memoir genre who know relatively little about the author herself. The audiobook version of the memoir is read by the Tan (at a slow pace that can at times become a bit annoying), something else that will appeal to her already-fans. The drawback to reading this one via audiobook, however, is not being able to study the numerous family photos and documents that are available in the printed version (additions I only learned of because I have a hardcopy of the book). But whichever way you decide to experience Where the Past Begins, it is an interesting look into the life of one of this America’s most respected authors.
    • 4/5
      A moving view into Amy Tan's store of memory and the stories she's been told and has imagined and re-imagined from their emotional hearts to explore the truth of the past. The importance of story in how we know and judge ourselves and others and the consequences of having stories imposed on us, is not so much a recurrent but a constant theme as she tells stories from her life an her parents' lives, early and late.
    • 3/5
      Where The Past Begins by Amy TanTruly a “Writer’s Memoir” as it is a literary joy to read. I loved in the introduction, where when mentioning mementos kept & discarded, she relates “To be honest, I have discarded photos of people I would never want to be reminded of again.” .. “ people I once trusted and who did the equivalent of knocking me down to be the first in line at the ice cream truck.” How with relics of her youth that her “fingerprints overlap those I had left as a child.”Told in vignettes of her life, entertaining tales of the early art, reading, seclusion, music and back history.Growing up in the shadow of her older “genius” brother, with a mentally unstable mother, performance pressing father and all the basic insecurities of children. She suffers the early death of both her brother and father, which further sets off her mother’s exasperation at life.There is lore ( “The Breaker of Combs” ) fascinating tidbits : that toons are set to classical music, the frontal lobe of the brain induces spontaneous creativity, what the vagus nerve is and does, tea rolling, caving (funny section), and what li hai means.Snarky, self-deprecating in many ways, there were several laugh out loud lines. A lovely flow of words that should have been edited better (too much repetition, especially dealing with her mother’s depression and suicide attempts.) It was fun getting this backstage pass into this intelligent woman’s life and thoughts.