* 2025 Taipei Book Fair Award
* 2024 Openbook Award

She started writing a memoir because she couldn't write a novel, but the more she writes, the more her memoir starts to look like fiction! With self-reflection and absurdist humor, she maps the terrain between fact and fiction, coming to a new understanding of memory, literary creation, and her own past.

After struggling and failing to write a novel, Tan assumes it will be easier to write a memoir. Nothing could be further from the truth…

She starts in the fourth grade, when, without warning, her parents divorced. Though she maintained appearances as she alternated between living with her mother and father, in truth, the divorce was a horrible psychological blow which left her feeling abandoned. She did her best to find her place socially, but ended up being excluded by her peers. Under the combined impact of her parents' estrangement and her marginalization at school, she adopted the role of an observer, which, after entering a boarding school for middle school, allowed her to explore the subtle tensions in friendships and intimate relationships.

As the adult Tan records these explorations in her memoir, she begins to question the veracity of memory. She contacts former classmates for confirmation, but discovers that the process of writing has already blurred the line between reality and fiction. What she has written in her memoir has consumed her memory of the actual events. Just as American poet Sylvia Plath took her own life by placing her head in an oven, Tan has placed her personal history into the proverbial oven, unwittingly killing off her own past, and allowing something new to grow in its place.

With her distinct brand of absurdist humor, author Lee Chia-Ying takes a deep dive into the challenges of growing up, and into the philosophical conundrums that arise when one is writing about oneself. By writing about writing, she creates a unique reading experience that invites the reader to witness both her story of growing up, and the process by which that story was born. Fans of metafiction, new literary forms, and coming-of-age stories will all find much to appreciate in this fresh and thought-provoking work of fiction.