Voting Station

Gish Jen

Please vote to see the next celebrity.

Author

The Resume

    (August 12, 1955- )
    Born in Long Island, New York
    Novelist, essayist and short story author
    Birth name is Lillian Jen
    Wrote the novels ‘Typical American’ (1991), ‘Mona in the Promised Land’ (1996), ‘The Love Wife’ (2004), and ‘World and Town’ (2010)
    Wrote two collections of short fiction ‘Who's Irish?’ (1999) and ‘Thank You, Mr. Nixon’ (2022)
    Best known short story is ‘In the American Society’ (1986)

Why she might be annoying:

    She got her high school nickname - and eventual pen name - from Lillian Gish (High school kids into silent movies? Who knew?).
    She is sometimes (unfairly) deemed interchangeable with Amy Tan.
    Her late 2010’s work panders to the anti-Trump Resistance crowd (see: ‘The Resisters,’ in 2020).

Why she might not be annoying:

    She was one of five children.
    Her parents emigrated from Shanghai to America after World War II.
    She completed an MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
    She taught English to engineers in Shandong, China in the early 1980's.
    Her first novel, 'Typical American,' was nominated for a National Books Critics' Circle Award in 1992.
    In 2012, Junot Diaz called her ‘the Great American Novelist we're always hearing about.’
    She wrote: ‘Try to distinguish ignorance from malice. And keep your animus for malice.’

Credit: BoyWithTheGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 13 Votes: 61.54% Annoying