Stripped to the bone

Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from her arm and drops it into the soup she has made for her dying mother. She spills another bowl of soup over her young daughter, seriously scalding the child’s neck. When that scarred little girl grows up and emigrates to America, she tells herself that to find her true identity, ‘You must peel off your skin, and that of your mother, and her mother before her. Until there is nothing. No scar, no skin, no flesh.’

Almost 30 years later, the author has finally found the courage to take her character’s advice. Coaxed into peeling back the layers of her own traumatic heritage by her long-term editor Daniel Halpern, Tan has produced a memoir that teases and circles a series of painful truths before pinning each to the page with steely precision.