Aimee E. Liu

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About Aimee E. Liu

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For now, here's my personal story:

Although I was born in Connecticut, my earliest memories are of India - the crisp feel of baked grass during the heat of summer, the primary colors of the tents that formed the classrooms of my nursery school, the taste of candied fennel seeds, and the faces of children peering, crying, playing, and begging from the fusty arcades of Connaught Circus to the alleys of Chandni Chowk. My father was born in Shanghai and my mother in Milwaukee, but India was the first home of my heart.

During my family's two years in New Delhi, my father traveled throughout Asia on business for the United Nations. My mother worked with the Indian Government, developing cottage industries, and adored South Asia. Expatriate life was full of everyday surprises, cultural challenges, and many Indian friends. My father, however, preferred China - at least until the Communist takeover in 1949.

Growing up with this quiet divide, I gave it little thought until, as an adult, I realized that it had contributed to my own overlapping loyalties. Though one quarter Chinese, I owed an allegiance to India, and although I was born and mostly raised in the U.S., my father's career with the United Nations gave me a stamp of internationality that made me more inclusive than exclusive about my cultural identity. As a result, I have always been partial to stories and images of people with mixed heritage.

When I began to write fiction, these same stories and images informed my novels, from FACE, about a young quarter-Chinese photographer coming to terms with her childhood in New York's Chinatown, to CLOUD MOUNTAIN, based on the marriage of my white American grandmother and Chinese revolutionary grandfather. My third novel, FLASH HOUSE, centers on an American social worker whose quest to rescue her missing husband produces an unlikely bond with a native child of mysterious origins in India and western China in 1949. These novels have been published in more than a dozen languages.

My new novel, GLORIOUS BOY, also is set in India, but in a remote corner, the Andaman Islands, which was the farthest western flank of Japanese occupation during WWII. This novel is a family drama that weaves this extraordinary history together with the archipelago's fascinating anthropological secrets. It is a story of mysterious minds, familial devotion, and heroic sacrifice.

Between India and fiction, of course, I did strike off in a few other directions. I spent my later childhood in suburban Connecticut, worked as a fashion model in New York, and graduated as a painting major from Yale University. My first book, SOLITAIRE, chronicled my passage through anorexia nervosa as a teenager. Released when I was just twenty-five, it was America's first anorexia memoir. In 2007, I returned to the subject of eating disorders in GAINING: THE TRUTH ABOUT LIFE AFTER EATING DISORDERS, which explores the many ways that eating disorders are NOT about eating and do not simply end with recovery of a healthy weight.

I have also co-authored seven books on psychology and medical topics, edited business and trade publications, and worked as a flight attendant and as associate producer for NBC's TODAY show.

Since 2006, I've been a member of the faculty of Goddard College's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA.

I live in Los Angeles with my husband. We have two grown sons.

Jenni Schaefer

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Author Updates

Books By Aimee E. Liu

All Formats Kindle Edition Audible Audiobook Paperback Hardcover

Glorious Boy May 12, 2020

by Aimee Liu

( 70 )

$9.49

"The most memorable and original novel I've read in ages..evokes every side in a multi-cultural conversation with sympathy and rare understanding."- Pico Iyer, author of Autumn Light

Starred reviews in Library Journal and Booklist
A New York Post Best Book of the Week

Glorious Boy is a tale of war and devotion, longing and loss, and the power of love to prevail.Set in India's remote Andaman Islands before and during WWII, the story revolves around a mysteriously mute 4-year-old who vanishes on the eve of Japanese Occupation. Little Ty's parents, Shep and Claire, will go to any lengths to rescue him, but neither is prepared for the brutal and soul-changing odyssey that awaits them.

Other Formats: Audible Audiobook , Paperback

Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders Feb 22, 2007

by Aimee E. Liu

( 64 )

$9.99

If you've ever suffered from an eating disorder-or cared for someone who is anorexic or bulimic-you may think you understand these illnesses. But do you really understand why they occur? Do you know what it takes to fully recover? Do you know how eating disorders affect life after recovery? Now, nearly three decades after she detailed her first battle with anorexia in Solitaire, Aimee Liu presents an emotionally powerful and poignant sequel that digs deep into the causes, cures, and consequences of anorexia and bulimia nervosa. Aimee Liu believed she had conquered anorexia in her twenties. Then in her forties, when her life once again began spiraling out of control, she stopped eating. Liu realized the same forces that had caused her original eating disorder were still in play. She also noticed that other women she knew with histories of anorexia and bulimia seemed to share many of her personality traits and habits under stress-even decades after "recovery." Intrigued and concerned, Liu set out to learn who is susceptible to these disorders and why, and what it takes to overcome them once and for all. With GAINING, Liu shatters commonly held beliefs about eating disorders while assembling a puzzle that is as complex and fascinating as human identity itself. Through cutting-edge research and the stories of more than forty interview subjects, readers will discover that the tendency to develop anorexia or bulimia has little to do with culture, class, gender-or weight. Genetics, however, play a key role. So does temperament. So do anxiety, depression, and shame. Clearly, curing eating disorders involves more than good nutrition. Candidly recalling her own struggles, triumphs, and defeats, Aimee explores an array of promising and innovative new treatments, offers vital insights to anyone who has ever had an eating disorder, and shows parents how to help protect their children from ever developing one. Her book is sure to change the way we talk and think about eating disorders for years to come.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

Solitaire May 3, 2016

by Aimee Liu

( 4 )

$3.99

Solitaire is the groundbreaking memoir of a young woman growing up in the 1970s and her triumph over anorexia nervosa.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

This title and over 1 million more available with Kindle Unlimited.

Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders Apr 26, 2011

by Aimee Liu , Judith D. Banker

( 9 )

$12.99

Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible. Despite what you may have been led to believe, most people with anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder are able to completely restore their health and well-being. But how does this happen?

Author Aimee Liu has woven together dozens of first-person accounts of recovery to create a break-through roadmap for healing from an eating disorder. Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives answers key questions including: How does healing begin? What does it feel like? What supports and accelerates it? Will I ever be free of worry about a relapse?

Throughout the book are informative sidebars written by leading professionals in the field, addressing essential topics such as finding the right therapist, the use of medications, exploring complementary treatments, and how family members can help.

Learn more at the author's website: www.aimeeliu.net.

Other Formats: Paperback

Flash House: A Novel May 1, 2019

by Aimee E. Liu

( 11 )

$8.49

From the acclaimed author of CLOUD MOUNTAIN comes a suspenseful novel of rescue and redemption set in Central Asia at the start of the Cold War, with two unforgettable heroines whose fates are irrevocably intertwined. When a plane carrying American journalist Aidan Shaw goes down in Kashmir in 1949, Aidan's wife Joanna refuses to accept that he is dead. Aidan has been accused of harboring Communist sympathies, and his mission to Kashmir was supposed to clear his name of these charges. Now Joanna is convinced that his disappearance involves more than accident. With Aidan's best friend and a mysterious native girl, Kamla, whom she has saved from an Indian brothel—or “flash house,” Joanna sets off for the northernmost reaches of India. The ensuing journey leads over some of the highest mountain passes in the world, finally landing the rescuers in western China just weeks before the Communist takeover—a world where nothing is as it appears.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

Cloud Mountain Jun 1, 2019

by Aimee E. Liu

( 23 )

$9.49

An epic saga of forbidden love that spans decades, cultures, and continents. Cloud Mountain is based on the true story of Aimee Liu's grandparents, a Chinese Scholar-Revolutionary and his American teacher, whose courtship blooms during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and whose life together in China carries them through the Warlord Era and the beginning of WWII.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback , Audio, Cassette

Face Oct 14, 2009

by Aimee Liu

$7.99

In her piercing and pignant fictional debut, Aimee Liu crosses continents and generations, from New York's Chinatown to pre-war Shaghai, to tell a tale of a young woman trapped between two worlds.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

False Love Sep 6, 1988

by Stan Katz , Aimee Liu

( 8 )

$9.99

The quest for true love appeals to us all — and yet the real thing is painfully elusive. According to Dr. Stan Katz, men and women today don't really know what to look for in a mate, or even how to love once we find one. No one teaches us. What's more, the images of love we absorb from society, the media, and popular culture are superficial and misleading. The result is false love — relationships based on illusions of what we think love should be rather than an appreciation of what it is.
False Love and Other Romantic Illusions is about the mistakes we all make in love, why we make them, and how we can correct them. Using in-depth case histories, Dr. Katz traces the course of false love from early childhood conditioning to adolescent crushes to adult relationships. He shows how our first misconceptions about love lead to mistakes, and how mistakes become patterns.
But the patterns of false love can be broken, and Dr. Katz points the way, with a practical, far-reaching program for achieving and sustaining true love. This timely, intelligent book will alter not only the way we seek intimate relationships, but the way we live them.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

Success Trap Feb 2, 1990

by Stan Katz , Aimee Liu

( 1 )

$9.99

In Success Trap, Dr. Stan Katz, an eminent Beverly Hills psychologist, shows you how to create a personal philosophy of success, one based not on the expectations of society, which so often distort our perceptions of what we want, but on a careful examination of your real character and needs. If your idea of success is presiding over a shareholders' meeting, flashing your smile on the cover of a national magazine, or showing off your perfect family, you might be trapped by your ambitions. As Dr. Katz shows in this compassionate, thought-provoking study, these measures of success are limited and limiting—if you accept them unthinkingly. What we all need is an internal measure of success, a firm idea of what it takes, not to be considered successful by others, but to feel successful ourselves.
This revolutionary book proposes nothing less than a new definition of success, a new philosophy of life, and a realistic path to fulfillment and happiness.

Other Formats: Hardcover , Paperback

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