LitCrush: Lisa See

Lisa See is the author of the megabestselling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a book that received so many good reviews that we decided not to read it out of pique. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a historical novel based on the true story of women in rural China who created and used a secret writing system to communicate with each other. Her new novel, Peony in Love, is about a very different set of Chinese women trying to communicate their thoughts.

Based on a true story, Peony in Love is about three wives who wrote a commentary on a famous Chinese opera, The Peony Pavilion. The Peony Pavilion is the story of a young girl who dreams of a young man, falls in love with him, then dies of lovesickness. As a ghost, she finds him, and his love brings her back to life. See was researching Snow Flower and came across references to the 'lovesick maidens'; young girls who would read The Peony Pavilion and be so affected by the words of the opera that they wasted away and died of a broken heart. It's not hard to understand why, See says, when you look at their lives. Girls were constantly devalued, had no freedoms, and no control over who they were married to. Without any experience of love in their lives, perhaps they were hoping that they could experience love if they died. Peony, the main character and the first of the 'wives', is a lovesick maiden.

It's not often that you hear genuine enthusiasm in the voice of the University Bookstore employee introducing an author. This time there was gushing. Lisa See spoke Tuesday night to a whole room full of people chattering happily to each other (apparently books about female friendships draw lots of female friends) who shut right up and listened in rapt silence once she started to talk about the lives of women in 17th century China. And darn it, she was so passionate and interesting that by the end of an hour she was assigned formal status as a Seattlest LitCrush. And we hereby promise to actually read the lady's books.

Previous LitCrushes include Nancy Pearl, Barbara Kingsolver, Gene Wolfe, and others. Check this space for further updates.