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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Soverblad, and today my guest is Amy Tan. I'm very happy whenever I see Amy because, well, she was here with her very first book, and at that time her editor and my dear friend, Faith Sale, had worked with the Joy Luck Club. Faith was on the show. Her agent,

Sandy Dykstra, was on the show. It was a small party. Amy Tan is, of course, the author of the

Joy Luck Club, the Kitchen God's Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses. And I wanted to begin in a certain way, you say something

very moving and cryptic about your editor, Faith Sale, who died last year of cancer,

leaving behind a great gap in the publishing community,

she was a great discoverer of writers she had edited,

Joseph Heller, John Barth, Donald Barthlemy,

and then started to discover new people, Alice Hoffman,

people who've been listening to Bookworm for a while have heard,

Heidi Julevitz, who was the last of the writer's faith worked with. At any rate, Amy Tan says, I give endless thanks to my dear friend and editor, the late Great Faith sale. To my astonishment, she could always sense the difference between what I was trying to write and what I wanted to write.

And I wondered what that difference in fact is.

I would always start off a book by trying to write an idea or sort of a reactionary version of a book that I thought I should write in comparison to the last book.

And Faith said, you know, you could write any sentence and it could be a good one, but she said,

I always know where your heart is.

And I think that because she knew my life as well, she knew me as a writer,

not as the author of some book, she also could see what my preoccupations were and read between

...