Secret Senses: Amy Tan’s Interview

A sketch of the Author

I am currently reading Amy Tan’s ‘The Hundred Secret Senses’ and came across this interview in The SALON.

A quote from the interview itself:

Olivia, Kwan’s American half-sister is not so happy-go-lucky. Pained, needy, she accidentally pulls heads off pet turtles and has a hard time with other people.

I took my own skepticism and embedded it into Olivia. Some of her — or the questions that trouble her — are drawn from friends who have the usual existential questions about life and relationships and work and success, and “Why are we here?” and “Why are we with this person?” I’ve already had interviewers wondering if Olivia’s relationship with her husband, Simon, is like my marriage, and I think, “Wait a minute, that’s not my husband, that’s not my relationship.” Certainly all of us have gone through fights with partners in our life, but that’s not drawn from my relationships per se. But I know that I’m going to be subject to that assumption.

So, ‘The Kite Runner’,…

I’m reading Khaled Hosseni’s ‘The Kite Runner’ currently, as part of my course at Uni, and thankfully all that ‘between the lines’ reading has not spoiled the experience.  Not yet, that is.

‘But the denigration of those we love always severs us from them a little. Idols must not be touched; the gilt comes off on our hands.’

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert