Before the beginning of The Bonesetter's Daughter proper, Amy Tan, in her acknowledgment and epigraph, signals a return to the matrilineal narrative that she never quite abandoned even in her novel about two half sisters, The Hundred Secret Senses. Between that novel and The Bonesetter's Daughter, a publishing gap of six years, Tan's mother sadly died in late 1999. Four years before this, Daisy Tan had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, with Tan temporarily giving up writing in order to care for her mother, as well as for her friend and editor who also died at about the same time. Not only did Tan lose a mother, but a reader and a “writer” too. As her comments in a 1991 essay, “Mother Tongue”, suggest: “I ... decided I

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Published 19 June 2003

Citation: Adams, Bella. "The Bonesetter's Daughter". The Literary Encyclopedia. 19 June 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1421, accessed 20 November 2009.]