Bad, Bad Girl
I adored Bad, Bad Girl. And it’s not just because I adore Gish Jen. (I was gobsmacked when she agreed to participate in MetroWest Readers Fest. My fan tendencies were in overdrive and she was sooo lovely.)
Jen’s writing is enduring and sneakily nonchalant, and maybe the best way to describe it is “literary” + humorous in an intellectual New Yorker kind of way. (I’m not trying to sound striver-y as if the New Yorker needs to be the barometer for everything — or anything, really — but given that she has had fiction published there since 1990, it’s a good descriptor.) She prods at notions of culture and identity in a breezy kind of way. I know I’ve recounted my introduction to her work already — a copy of her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land landed in the Tufts Observer office and I snagged it for myself — but from that moment in 1996, I knew that I had encountered a favorite author.
Bad, Bad Girl is not humorous — it’s some combo of autofiction and memoir chronicling her difficult relationship with her abusive mother — but I still felt Gish’s outward convivial and affable nature was on display. I’m thankful to not have a “difficult” relationship with my own mother. But just as I devoured Gish’s work while commuting on the T or after one of my epic map-less walks through Cambridge and felt that this author who was ahead of me in life (who also lived somewhere nearby…the thrill!) was foreshadowing my adulthood, I read Gish’s latest and understand that, again, she is providing a roadmap for the later years ahead of me.
I’ve always felt a kinship with her writing … which, admittedly, is a bit unusual given that so much of her work touches upon the interplay of Chinese and American culture. But I think that’s the beauty of Gish Jen and her work: accessible, intelligent, and steady. There’s a reason that John Updike named her as his “successor” as chronicler of American life.
Read this one for a clear-eyed view of a prolific writer’s life and then tick off every other book she’s written. (I’ll be including some in my own 50 for 50, so stay tuned…)
{See below for some excerpts from Gish’s “This is 70” interview with Oldster Magazine.
originally published on instagram