When Amy Tan wrote her first book, The Joy Luck Club, she was trying to portray the difficult relationship she had had with her mother, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, and the emotional voyage they took to understand each other. But the novel struck a universal chord, and it became a massive bestseller, launching Amy Tan’s career as a literary superstar. Tan talks here candidly about the traumas in her life (the death of both her father and her brother when she was 15), and about the unusual path she took to start writing fiction at the age of 33.