Before the beginning of
The Bonesetter's Daughterproper, Amy Tan, in her acknowledgment and epigraph, signals a return to the matrilineal narrative that she never quite abandoned even in her novel about two half sisters,
The Hundred Secret Senses. Between that novel and
The Bonesetter's Daughter, a publishing gap of six years, Tan's mother sadly died in late 1999. Four years before this, Daisy Tan had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, with Tan temporarily giving up writing in order to care for her mother, as well as for her friend and editor who also died at about the same time. Not only did Tan lose a mother, but a reader and a “writer” too. As her comments in a 1991 essay, “Mother Tongue”, suggest: “I ... decided I should envision a reader for the stories I would write. And…
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Citation: Adams, Bella. "The Bonesetter's Daughter". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 June 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1421, accessed 04 December 2024.]
