The Tao of Amy Tan, Author and Lyme patient

[Guest guest]

Amy Tan has a rare genius for prose that seems effortless and feels

like listening to someone you both like and respect tell you the

hard things about life that they have never told anyone else.

She is so good at this that one wants to call her " Amy " not " Ms.

Tan, " in the manner of a formal book review.

I will opt for Ms. Tan because I do not pretend to know Amy

personally or understand her as one understands a friend. It is the

art of her fiction that makes it seem so.

In a series of articles and interviews, Ms. Tan reports on a severe

case of neuro-Borreliosis. There is a great advantage in having a

public figure testify to this kind of 'controversial' illness and

the suffering and loss of function it brings with it.

Ms. Tan has been proactive in tapping that potential for good, and

talked bravely of how the disease ravaged her at the intersection of

her personal and professional life, left her hobbling on a cane,

prone to seizure and hallucination, unable to compose a sentence

when she has composed so very many memorable sentences, more in this

early phase of her literary career than I expect to utter in the

whole of my life.

That is not adulation but respect for an artist exploring the outer

limits of her craft and delivering with such a sure touch the

essentially risky nature of the experiment is easily overlooked. You

do not get " The Kitchen God's Wife " or " The Bonesetter's Daughter "

without taking extravagant risks. Amy Tan is a trip to literary

Vegas where one can count on hitting the jackpot. She's also cool

enough not to be offended by the crudity of that image, and to play

in a rock band with King.

Ms. Tan is a celebrated figure in " popular fiction " and rightly so,

because her novels convey life with a directness that is wasted on

professional literary critics. Not that she does not enjoy their

esteem, but from such corners there can be no adequate response to

what Ms. Tan has achieved in novels that are part intimate journal,

part exotic travelogue from a journey across cultures and

generations.

It strikes me as meaningful in some way that I cannot articulate,

that this artist in particular should suffer from Lyme disease and

the peculiar exile to the medical wilderness that tends to go with

it, particularly in extreme cases. There are more chronic forms of

the disease. What Ms. Tan describes so far - and with a microbe this

persistent it is still early days - is not so much a chronic illness

as a prolonged but acute manifestation of a terrifyingly versatile

disease.

Lyme disease is a true pandemic, in the sense that huge numbers have

been affected around the world and they are so diverse a group that

one cannot in any sense consider the epidemic to be 'self-contained'.

Amy Tan excels at finding the universal in the particular, restoring

our deepest feelings to their source in intimate - and by

definition, without reference to ethnicity, " exotic " - experience.

She directs our attention to the intersection of the unique and the

universal, which is what every great author of fiction must achieve,

but she achieves it with a talent that makes us think - perhaps

rightly - that nothing is more natural.

There is such a thing in life as reciprocity. Sometimes we call

it " karma, " sometimes we use more mundane language to describe it,

but all of us know it exists, or if we don't are due in short order

to find out.

I was falling, and you caught me. I was falling, because the ground

of everday life split apart beneath my feet and there was no bottom

to that pit, no end to how far out of life's shared frames of

reference I might fall. I was falling, thinking there was no one

there to catch me, and there you were.

When I address those statements to Amy Tan, there is no sentiment.

There is only honest gratitude for miracles unlooked for (as

miracles always are) and comfort that abides (as true comfort always

does, to some degree). I don't know Amy Tan, but she has touched my

life at a level that many who do know me have yet to discover for

themselves.

Let me conclude with an agnostic's honest prayer:

God bless you Amy Tan. God bless us one and all.

scha