'THE OPPOSITE OF FATE' | A review Amy Tan shares details of her life

The central influence in her life was her mother, Daisy.
By MOLLY KNIGHT
BALTIMORE SUN
"The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings," by Amy Tan (Putnam, $24.95)
At the beginning of this collection of meditations on her life and work, Amy Tan sets the record straight: "The Joy Luck Club," her 1996 best seller about four Chinese immigrants and their daughters, is not a memoir. Nor is her most recent book, "The Bonesetter's Daughter."
Contrary to popular misconceptions, Tan writes, these stories are based only loosely on her life and are inspired instead by what she calls "emotional truths." Her personal history, she insists, would not make good fodder for fiction: "It is too full of coincidences, too full of melodrama, veering toward the implausible in both tragedy and comedy."
So begins this amalgam of musings in which Tan lays bare the facts of her life. Taken as a whole, these snippets do, indeed, amount to a melodramatic, tragic and comedic tale. Individually, however, most of them are not absorbing enough to stand alone.
Although they are strung casually together, the chapters in this work are connected by one overwhelming influence on Tan's life: her mother. While she establishes the book's theme as "fate and its many permutations," it is the complex, intimate relationship with her mother, Daisy, that informs the book.
'Double jeopardy'
"The girl sees that her mother, who is her ally, is also her adversary," she writes. "That is the emotional memory I do have, this sense of double jeopardy, realizing that my mother could both help me and hurt me, in the best and worst ways possible."
Much like many of Tan's characters, her mother was a mystic -- someone who communicated with ghosts, sought life direction using a Ouija board and believed that she had been cursed with a lifetime of bad luck.
Her life does, as Tan tells it, seem to have been cursed. Her own mother (Tan's grandmother) took her life by swallowing a bottle of opium.
Later in life, within a span of six months, Daisy Tan lost her 16-year-old son, Peter, then her husband, John -- both of whom died of brain tumors.
In the wake of these tragedies, she became obsessed with morbid thoughts -- many of which she shared with her daughter. When she was just 6, Tan recalls, her mother dragged her to a funeral for one of her playmates. Pointing to the young girl's body, she said: "This is what happens when you don't listen to your mother."
In sharing these dark and rather tragic pieces of her life, Tan is refreshingly candid and not at all self-pitying. In addition, she sprinkles the book with many lighthearted details of her own successes, which include four novels, two children's books and a blissful marriage. While some of these details are painfully detailed, others are lovely.