Tan finished high school at the College Monte Rosa Internationale in Montreux, an outsider among the children of ambassadors, tycoons, and princes and still burdened by her losses and her anger. Because being good had not saved her father and brother, she decided to turn bad. She made friends with drug-dealing hippies and was arrested at sixteen. The nadir of her Montreux year came when she nearly eloped to Australia with a mental patient who claimed he was a deserter from the German army.
When the Tans returned to the United States, Amy enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, majoring first in premed and later in English. After meeting Lou DiMattei on a blind date, eighteen-year-old Amy transferred to San Jose State University, where DiMattei was a law student, and put herself through college with the help of a scholarship and income from a job in a pizza parlor. She earned a B.A. in 1973 and married DiMattei in 1974, the same year she completed a master's degree in English and linguistics and enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley. She quit in 1976, when the murder of her best friend brought back her sense of loss and anger.
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