Amy Tan Gets Frank on Failure

An interview excerpt with best-selling novelist Amy Tan (of Joy Luck Club fame) from www.Achievement.org; June 28, 1996, Sun Valley, Idaho.

In this insightful interview with one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, Ms. Tan addresses a few aspects of failure – and success, for that matter – that might surprise you. For this post’s purposes, we’re jumping into the interview on page 6 of its 7 pages…

Q: Speaking now only of your writing career, what setbacks or detours have you had along the way and how have you dealt with them and learned from them? Self-doubts, fear of failure?

A: I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure. I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.

The success took me by surprise and it frightened me. On the day that there was a publication party for my book, I spent the whole day crying. I was scared out of my mind that my life was changing and it was out of my control and I didn’t know why it was happening. I thought it would ruin things, because at that moment in my life I was fairly happy. I was getting along with my mother. My husband and I had been married for a long time, we were happy, we had our first house, we had great friends, we were doing well, we weren’t starving. We had a comfortable living and I thought, “Things are going to get messed up here and I have no control over this.” I could already see how people were treating me differently.

That’s the scary thing. You know, when people say, “How has success changed you?” you have to say, “No. How have people changed toward you as the result of success?” And “How have you dealt with that change in how people have changed toward you?” That’s the most difficult thing.

So I went through a terrible period of feeling that I had lost my privacy, that I had lost a sense of who I was. I was scared by the way people measured everything by numbers: where I was on a list, or how many weeks, or how many books I had sold. By the time it came to the second book, I was so freaked out, I broke out in hives. I couldn’t sleep at night. I broke three teeth grinding my teeth. I had backaches. I had to go to physical therapy. I was a wreck!

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away. You know, 100 pages here, 200 pages there and I’d say, “Is this what they liked in The Joy Luck Club? Is this the style, is this the story? No, I must write something completely different. I must write no Chinese characters to prove that I’m multi-talented.” Or “No, I must write this way in a very erudite way to show I have a way to use big words.” It’s both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success. It took me a long time to get over that, and just finally being able to breathe again and say, “What’s important? Why are you a writer? Why did you write that book in the first place? What did you learn? What did you discover? What was the most rewarding part of that?”

Don’t think of what’s going to happen afterwards. If it’s a failure, will you think what you wrote was a failure, that the whole time was wasted? If it’s a success, will you think the words are more valuable?

That crisis helped me to define what was important for me. It started off with family. It started off with knowing myself, with knowing the things I wanted as a constant in my life: trust, love, kindness, a sense of appreciation, gratitude. I didn’t want to become cynical. I didn’t want to become a suspicious person. Those were the things that helped me decide what I was going to write.

If you’re interested in reading this interview in its entirety, just click here. And by all means, consider bookmarking Achievement.org – “A Museum of Living History.” It’s a robust, fascinating, inspiring site!

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