Bad Bad Girl

An unsentimental, insightful, and brutally honest account of Chinese family relationships, in China and in the West – Jung Chang, author of Wild SwansWhat an amazing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything - except the voices of our parents – Junot DíazA tender, poignant family history, laced with sharp insight and quiet humour. Bad Bad Girl is not just the story of women who journeyed from the old world to the new, but also of the luminous, deeply personal world they carried within – Yan Ge, author of Strange Beasts of ChinaReading Bad Bad Girl, I felt a deep ache for mothers and daughters divided by culture and silence. Gish Jen writes tenderly about a woman carrying old China in her bones while raising a child in America. This story shows how quiet courage can be, and how a “bad girl” is often just a woman who refuses to vanish. Many will find comfort and recognition in these pages – Xinran Xue, author of The Good Women of ChinaShocking, illuminating and in places truly heartbreaking. When a book contains all of that, does it really matter which category it falls into? * Sunday Times *[A] fiercely honest slice of autobiographical fiction… negotiates [ideas] of shared legacy with unsentimental frankness * Mail on Sunday *The difference between the mother we had and the mother we may have wanted is at the heart of Gish Jen’s novel-cum-memoir Bad Bad Girl… It dissects the bruises that bleed through families over generations and how they can be exacerbated by oceans crossed, by unimagined exiles and forsaken homeland… This book is not a forgiveness, but an acknowledgment that it was hard * FT *Bad Bad Girl is a daughter’s attempt to comprehend her fraught relationship with an emotionally closed mother… Playful, witty… strikingly poignant… The writer’s grief - not only for her dead mother, but for the relationship they never had - erupts on the page * Times Literary Supplement *Heart-breaking, difficult-to-read but incredibly honest and compelling * Shortlist *Blending the fluidity of fiction with the emotional truth of memoir, Jen crafts a book that is genre-defying… Courageous and brimming with emotional intelligence, Bad Bad Girl is a reflection on identity, diaspora, and the complicated love between parent and child * Voice Magazine *An intriguing blend of fiction and nonfiction… Bad Bad Girl is also a case study of the way the sweeping events of world history can warp individual lives; at times, it functions as a kind of capsule summary of 20th-century Chinese history * Guardian *Glorious… comic, gut-wrenching… In this redemptive book, Jen has found a means to mourn the mother she could have had - and to honour the matriarch she survived * Big Issue *

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Gish Jen has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and taught at Harvard, Brandeis and NYU Shanghai. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories five times.