A Perfect Day to Put Your Head in the Oven: A Novel

In this fiendishly funny and charming novel, a young woman revisits her childhood and realizes all was not as it seemed.

Tan’s attempt to write her first novel, A Clueless Man Shakes His Thump-Thumping Head, is not going well. She tries to write a memoir instead, but this involves checking her own memories against her parents and old classmates, who are surprised to hear from her after all these years. “Are you dying?” asks one perplexed friend.

Tan is not dying, but she does want to figure ...