Description

The only difference between fiction and memoir is Truth . . .

What if you wrote your memoir – and everyone in it told you that you remembered your life wrong?

AN AWARD-WINNING TAIWANESE LITERARY SENSATION
Translated by Lin King, translator of International Booker Prize-winning TAIWAN TRAVELOGUE

Reader love for A PERFECT DAY TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE OVEN

***** ‘Reading this made me fly back to my own past‘

***** ‘I enjoyed its tenderness. Like the protagonist at the end, I felt warmth float into my eyes‘

***** ‘Interesting and philosophical. This cleverly considers the differences between fiction and reality’

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A funny, tender and genre-defying novel for readers of Lucia Berlin, Elena Ferrante and Meiko Kawakami, about a writer who gives up on fiction – only to discover how unreliable the truth can be.

Faced with writer’s block, Tan abandons her first novel and decides to write a memoir instead.

She begins revisiting her youth, sparking a lively dialogue with old friends about what really happened. Was it a dinner-table game that revealed her parents were on the brink of divorce? Was her aunt’s shower curtain really made from raincoats? And whose version of the past can she trust?

But as Tan writes, something strange begins to happen. Her memoir starts to acquire a life of its own, gradually replacing the past with something new.

What emerges from the metaphorical oven is no longer a faithful record, but a freshly baked creation made from memory, imagination and desire.

Funny, moving and startlingly original, A PERFECT DAY TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN THE OVEN asks what happens when the stories we tell about our lives become more powerful than the truth.
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‘A gorgeous, surprising and deeply intelligent book. I read it rapt and awestruck’
CLAIRE VAYE WATKINS

Reader love:

***** ‘A book to read over and over‘

***** ‘Not only a process of “memory reconstruction”, but a dialectic of “fiction vs. reality”‘

***** ‘Its words are like a whirlpool, pulling me back to my teenage years’