When Amy Tan was a girl, her mother warned her to stay away from boys. "She said, Don't let a boy kiss you because maybe you can't stop. And then you're gonna have a baby." Her mother went on to enumerate all of the terrible things that happen to a girl when she has a baby, ending with, "You want to kiss a boy? You might as well just kill yourself right now!"

"And I thought, What was so good about it that you couldn't stop?" Tan said.

It was a funny story, but one tinged with darkness, as were so many of the stories that Tan told on Wednesday night at Talk of the Stacks at the Central Library in Minneapolis. "When she told me this, I didn't know that had had a first husband," Tan said. "I didn't know that she had three daughters living in China."

Self-deprecating, elegant and fascinating, Tan mesmerized the crowd with her stories of family drama. And it was a true crowd, for sure--Pohlad Auditorium was filled, and guests packed into two overflow rooms, where they watched her on movie screens, and a handful more stood out in the atrium, listening to her on the speakers. Nearly 450 people showed up, one of the biggest crowds yet for the library's popular program.

Tan read only briefly from her new book, "The Valley of Amazement," and instead told stories about her mother and her grandmother--familiar figures to anyone who has read her novels. Her new book travels from China to the United States, following the lives of a courtesan and her daughter in the first half of the 20th century

While writing "Valley," Tan kept two photographs on her desk: One of her mother, and one of her grandmother. Her mother left Shanghai in 1942 on a student visa, leaving behind an abusive husband and their three daughters. Tan never knew if her mother meant to abandon her children, but she was not allowed to return to China for 30 years. "My mother was impetuous, and passionate, and suicidal," Tan said. "She taught me that I must always be independent."

Tan's grandmother was, she said, "a tragic figure. Spoiled. She married late, at 24, and her husband died in the 1919 Pandemic." According to Chinese culture, she was supposed to remain a widow the rest of her life, but one night, when visiting a friend, she awoke to find a man in her bed. "There are two versions to the story," Tan said. In one version, the man holds a knife to her grandmother's throat and says, "If you don't marry me, I will kill you." In the other version, he holds a knife to his own throat and says, "If you don't marry me, I will kill myself."

Tan's grandmother married him and worked out a deal: If she bore him a son, he would buy her a house in Shanghai. She bore him a son, he reneged on his part of the bargain, and she killed herself, leaving behind Tan's mother, who was then 9 years old.

When writing "Valley," Tan said, she entered the world of her grandmother, but the book is not about her grandmother. "It does have a lot to do with the themes in my family--betrayal, abandonment, passionate women, suicidal women, impetuous women, and love, love, love."

"Valley" is her first novel in eight years, and Tan joked that "the best thing about finishing it is people no longer ask when's your book going to come out. The worst thing is they ask why it took so long."