It’s the birthday of Chinese American author Amy Tan (b. 1952), known for her novels about Chinese American women and their Chinese mothers with often horrific back stories, and whose own back story has provided plenty of fodder for these novels.

Tan was born in Oakland, California, to Chinese immigrant parents. Her father, John, was an electrical engineer and a Baptist minister who had fled civil war in China; her mother, Daisy, had fled an abusive marriage in China (Tan’s father was her second husband) and left three children behind hoping to send for them. Instead, China shut its doors and she didn’t see them for another 30 years. The family moved around the San Francisco Bay area a great deal, which contributed to Tan’s sense of isolation, and her mother was, you know, difficult: sometimes Daisy threatened to kill herself, at least once she threatened to kill Tan with a butcher knife. When Tan was 14, her older brother and her beloved, loving father both died of brain tumors within a year of each other. At this time, Tan was molested by a trusted community leader.

After her brother and father’s deaths, Tan’s mother moved the family to Switzerland for just a few years, where Tan was almost raped by a janitor at her private school. Tan in fact experienced enough violent and traumatic events in her life that I can’t list them all, but let’s mention having to identify the body of a murdered roommate while in graduate school. All of this trauma has resulted in Tan living constantly with a sense of impending danger and violence.

Something good happened: she married Italian-American tax lawyer Louis DeMattei, who loved Chinese food and therefore got in good with Daisy.

Tan established a career as a successful freelance corporate writer; she worked a ton and was never satisfied. In 1987, she and Daisy took a trip to China and met two of her half-sisters, and the experience partly inspired Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), which spent 77 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The novels that followed—The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), and The Valley of Amazement (2013)—have also been hugely successful and are credited with bringing attention to the world of Chinese immigrants.

Daisy was eventually diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and died at age 83 in 1999; before she died, she apologized to Tan for doing something terrible to her as a child (the knife incident), though she didn’t remember what. Tan herself contracted Lyme disease and now lives with that, as well as taking anti-depressants. She and her husband live in San Francisco; they decided never to have children, because Tan was worried about passing on her family tradition of depression and suicidal thoughts. Tan’s latest book is a sort of memoir, Where the Past Begins (2017).

Have a breathtakingly stable Tuesday, just a real workhorse of a day, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.