It has been a long time since I have read The Joy Luck Club, but I have always admired the writing of Amy Tan. This book, a nonfiction account of her life through loosely connected stories, details her tumultuous relationship with her mother, her life as a writer, and the background of her novels. For the aspiring writer, she gives some writing tips as well as a picture of her writing process. I particularly enjoyed her struggles to write a second book after the overwhelming success of The Joy Luck Club. According to a writing friend of hers, the second novel will always be "lousy." And so she wrote the beginnings of many novels until she hit upon what she refers to as her eighth novel, The Kitchen God's Wife. As I search for a topic for a second novel after completing Out of the Dragon's Mouth to be released in March of 2015, I find her problem of finding a topic for a second novel to be reassuring. Her Chinese family believed in fate, but after the deaths of her brother and her father, Amy decides to take charge of her own life Reading this book made me want to reread her novels and revisit the movie, The Joy Luck Club. You should too.