In this genre-bending book, Jen explores her damaging relationship with her mother, how she became a writer, and her mother’s ...

First, you get stuck with a crappy mom. Then she lives to be 95. That’s nearly a century of terribleness. In “Bad Bad Girl” author Gish Jen’s case, “terrible” doesn’t quite cover it. Her Chinese ...

The novel is two books in one: an imagined account of her mother’s early years in Shanghai and the U.S., and a fictionalized ...

To write about one’s mother is to risk every kind of disapproval, including the posthumous. One imagines that Gish Jen’s mother, had she lived to read it, would have vigorously objected to her ...