Huffington Post: Rita Zoey Chin

I’m over at Huffington Post talking to Rita Zoey Chin about her exceptionally well-written memoir, Let the Tornado Come. You can read the whole interview here. Below, an excerpt:

Scott Russell Sanders once introduced a reading of his work, A Private History of Awe (FSG, 2006), with a self-deprecating remark that he had sworn he would “never commit memoir.” It was a nod to critics of the genre who hold that one must live a remarkable life, before presuming to recount its vagaries and glories between the covers of a book, though, indeed, what Sanders did was to recount what would be considered a quiet life, with great literary aspect and to lasting spiritual import. Chin’s account of her life, so far from the lower-key evolution of the young boy Sanders was into the adult he became, nonetheless, strikes the same poetic beauty. Let the Tornado Come is not a litany of all that went wrong, but a near euphoric ode to the human spirit that pulls a little girl through each wrong toward a light that makes sense to her and, equally importantly, to each of us. It is one thing to have lived a life worth writing about, but it is a talent to search that undeniably particular life for the moments that can ring true to those who will never know even a second of the darkness that fell so insistently and relentlessly upon her, first as a child, and later as a young adult.


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