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• French Braid Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2022
• Three Days in June Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2025

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  Anne Tyler

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Anne Tyler
  Born October 25, 1941 (age 83)
  Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
  Occupation
  Novelistshort story writerliterary critic
  Education Duke University (BA)
  Columbia University
  Genre Literary realism
  Notable works
  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
  The Accidental Tourist
  Breathing Lessons
  Notable awards National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (1985)
  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1989)
  Website
  www.annetyler.com
  Anne Tyler (born October 25, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-five novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.[1] Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020.

  She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail",[2] her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."[3]

  Tyler has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.

  Early life and education
  Early childhood
  The oldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South.[4] Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville.[5][6] The Celo Community settlement was populated largely by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends.[7] Tyler lived there from age seven through eleven and helped her parents and others care for livestock and organic farming. While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house. Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school.[4][5][6][8]

  Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age three and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night."[5] Her first book at age seven was a collection of drawings and stories about "lucky girls ... who got to go west in covered wagons."[5] Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing "how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same."[9] This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child.[4] When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Tyler had never attended public school and never used a telephone.[5] This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise."[10]

  Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life.[5] She believes that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer: "I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]. In my case, it was emerging from the commune ... and trying to fit into the outside world."[5] Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age eleven, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh. With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others.[4] Eudora Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and The Wide Net and Other Stories is one of her favorite books; she has called Welty "my crowning influence."[6] She credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events.[5] During her years at Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock.[4][11] "Mrs. Peacock" had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University. Peacock would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin. Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to "Mrs. Peacock, for everything you've done."[11]

  When Tyler graduated from high school at age sixteen, she wanted to attend Swarthmore College, a school founded in 1860 by the Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends.[12] However, she had won a full AB Duke scholarship[13] to Duke University, and her parents pressured her to go to Duke because they needed to save money for the education of her three younger brothers.[4][14] At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell. Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as "frighteningly mature for 16," "wide-eyed," and "an outsider."[5] Years later Price would describe Tyler as "one of the best novelists alive in the world, ... who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now."[5][8] Tyler took an additional creative writing course with Price and also studied under William Blackburn, who also had taught William Styron, Josephine Humphreys, and James Applewhite at Duke, as well as Price and Chappell.[8]

  As a college student, Tyler had not yet determined she wanted to become a writer. She loved painting and the visual arts. She also was involved in the drama society in high school and at Duke, where she acted in a number of plays, playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie and Mrs. Gibbs in Our Town.[5][8][15] She majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age nineteen, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University.[8]

  Living in New York City was quite an adjustment for her. There she became somewhat addicted to riding trains and subways: "While I rode I often felt like I was ... an enormous eye taking things in, turning them over and sorting them out ... writing was the only way" [to express her observations].[5] Tyler left Columbia graduate school after a year, having completed course work but not her master's thesis. She returned to Duke, where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer.[4] It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married a year later (1963).[4]

  Career
  Early writing and first publications
  While an undergraduate at Duke, Tyler published her short story "Laura" in the Duke literary journal Archive, for which she won the newly created Anne Flexner award for creative writing.[4][8] In college and prior to her marriage, she wrote many short stories, one of which impressed Reynolds Price so that he later stated that it was the "most finished, most accomplished short story I have ever received from an undergraduate in my thirty years of teaching."[5] "The Saints in Caesar's Household" was published in Archive also and won her a second Anne Flexner award. This short story led to her meeting Diarmuid Russell, to whom Price had sent it with kudos. Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Tyler's "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Tyler's agent.[5][8]

  While working at the Duke University library, before and after marrying Modarressi—Tyler did continue to write short stories and started work on her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes. During this period her short stories appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers.[5] After the couple moved to Montreal—Modarressi's U.S. visa had expired and they moved there so he could finish his residency—Tyler continued writing while looking for work.[4][8] Her first novel was published in 1964 and The Tin Can Tree was published the next year. Years later she disowned both of these novels, as well as many of the short stories she wrote during this period. She has even written that she "would like to burn them."[14] She feels that most of this early work suffers from the lack of thorough character development and her failure to rework material repeatedly.[6]

  In 1965 at age 24, Tyler had her first child, a daughter they named Tezh. Two years later a second daughter, Mitra, was born. About this time, the couple moved to Baltimore, MD as Taghi had finished his residency and obtained a position at the University of Maryland Medical School.[4] With the moves, the changes in jobs, and the raising of two young children, Tyler had little time or energy for writing and published nothing between 1965 and 1970.[5] She settled comfortably in the city of Baltimore where she has remained and where she has set most of her subsequent novels. Baltimore is generally considered to have a true mix of Southern and Northern culture. It also is an area of considerable Quaker presence, and Tyler eventually enrolled both her daughters in a local Friends school.[4] During this period she began writing literary reviews for journals, newspapers, etc. to provide the family with additional income; she would continue this employment until the late 1980s, writing approximately 250 reviews in total.[8] While this period was not productive for her writing career, Tyler does feel that this time enriched her spirit and her experience and in turn gave her subsequent writing greater depth, as she had "more of a self to speak from."[14]

  Tyler began writing again in 1970 and had published three more novels by 1974: A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation. In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote a great deal more focus to it than had been possible since she graduated from Duke.[6] With Celestial Navigation, Tyler began to get national recognition: Gail Godwin gave it a very favorable review in the New York Times Review of Books.[4] While she is not proud of her first four novels, Tyler considers this fifth novel one of her favorites. It was a difficult book to write she notes, since it required rewriting draft after draft to truly develop her understanding of the characters.[5] John Updike gave a favorable review to her next novel, Searching for Caleb, writing: "Funny and lyric and true, exquisite in its details and ambitious in its design ... This writer is not merely good, she is wickedly good."[16] Afterwards he proceeded to take an interest in her work and reviewed her next four novels as well.[4] Morgan's Passing (1980) won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[4] Joyce Carol Oates gave it good review in Mademoiselle: "Fascinating ... So unconventional a love story that it appears to take its protagonists themselves by surprise."[17][better source needed]

  National recognition
  With her next novel, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world. Tyler's ninth novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, which she considers her best work,[6] was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, and the American Book Award for Fiction in 1983. In his review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, "Her art needed only the darkening that would give her beautifully shaped sketches solidity ... In her ninth novel, she has arrived at a new level of power."[18] Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985, the Ambassador Book Award for Fiction in 1986, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. The critical and commercial success of the film further increased the public awareness of her work. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine's "Book of the Year".[8] It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels.[19][20]

  Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 13 more novels; many have been Book of the Month Club Main Selections and have become New York Times Bestsellers. Ladder of Years was chosen by Time as one of the ten best books of 1995. A Patchwork Planet was a New York Times Notable Book (1999). Saint Maybe (1991) and Back When We Were Grownups (2001) were adapted into TV movies in 1998 and 2004, respectively.[21][22] In her 2006 novel Digging to America, she explored how an immigrant from Iran, who has lived in the U. S. for 35 years, deals with her "outsiderness," perspectives with which Tyler is familiar due to her marriage to Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi.

  In addition to her novels, Tyler has published short stories in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, but they have never been published as a collection.[5][8] Her stories include "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters" (1977), "Holding Things Together" (1977), and "Teenage Wasteland" (1983). Between 1983 and 1996, she edited three anthologies: The Best American Short Stories 1983, Best of the South, and Best of the South: The Best of the Second Decade.

  Personal life
  In 1963, Tyler married Iranian psychiatrist and novelist Taghi Mohammad Modarressi. Modarressi, 10 years her senior, had left Iran and his family as a political refugee at age 25.[4][23] After a year and a half internship in Wichita, Kansas, he obtained a residency in child psychiatry at Duke University Medical School. There he met Tyler and discovered their common interest in literature.[4] Modarressi had written two award-winning novels in Persian and so was quite an accomplished writer himself. He later wrote three more novels, two of which Tyler helped to translate to English (The Book of Absent People and The Pilgrim's Rules of Etiquette).[4][24] In the 1980s, Modarressi founded the Center for Infant Study in Baltimore and the Cold Spring Family Center Therapeutic Nursery in Pimlico, Maryland, which dealt with children who had experienced emotional trauma.[24] Modarressi died in 1997 at the age of 65, from lymphoma.

  Tyler and Modarressi had two daughters, Tezh and Mitra. Both share their mother's interest in, and talent for, painting. Tezh is a professional photographer, and an artist who works primarily in oils,[25] who painted the cover of her mother's novel, Ladder of Years.[4] Mitra is a professional illustrator working primarily in watercolors. She has illustrated seven books, including two children's books co-authored with Tyler (Tumble Tower and Timothy Tugbottom Says No!).[4][26]

  Tyler resides in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, where most of her novels are set. Today tourists can even take an "Anne Tyler tour" of the area.[6] For some time she was noteworthy among contemporary best-selling novelists, for she rarely granted face-to-face interviews nor did book tours nor made other public appearances. In 2012 she broke with this policy and gave her first face-to-face interview in almost 40 years; subsequently, Mark Lawson interviewed her on BBC Radio in 2013 about her approach to writing.[6][27] In 2015, she discussed her 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, in a live radio interview with Diane Rehm and callers on The Diane Rehm Show.[28]

  Writing style, influences, and philosophy
  Tyler's novels have been reviewed and analyzed by numerous fellow authors, scholars and professional critics. The summary that follows of the nature of her work relies upon selected descriptions and insights by a limited number of the many distinguished literati who have reviewed her works. Also Tyler herself has revealed much about her own writing through interviews. Although she has refused to participate in face-to-face interviews until very recently, she has participated in numerous e-mail interviews over the years. These e-mail interviews have provided material for biographies, journal articles, reader's guides, and instructional materials.

  Classification of her literature
  Tyler has occasionally been classified as a "Southern author" or a "modern American author." The Southern category apparently results from the fact that she grew up and went to college in the South. Also she admired and/or studied under well-known Southern authors Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price. In a rare interview with The New York Times, Tyler cited Eudora Welty as a major literary influence: "Reading Eudora Welty when I was growing up showed me that very small things are often really larger than the large things".[29] However, poet and author Katha Pollitt notes, "It is hard to classify Anne Tyler's novels. They are Southern in their sure sense of family and place but lack the taste for violence and the Gothic that often characterizes self-consciously southern literature. They are modern in their fictional techniques, yet utterly unconcerned with contemporary moment as a subject, so that, with only minor dislocations, her stories could just as well have taken place in twenties or thirties."[2]

  It is also difficult to classify Tyler in terms of themes; as she herself notes, "I don't think of my work in terms of themes. I'm just trying to tell a story."[30] Tyler goes on to say, "Any large 'questions of life' that emerge in my novels are accidental—not a reason for writing the novel in the first place but either (1) questions that absorb my characters, quite apart from me, or (2) on occasion, questions that may be thematic to my own life at the moment, even if I'm not entirely aware of them. Answers, if they come, come from the characters' experiences, not from mine, and I often find myself viewing those answers with a sort of distant, bemused surprise."[5]

  Characters and detailed descriptions
  In Tyler's works, the characters are the driving forces behind the stories and the starting point for her writing: "I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they'll react in any situation ... My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper ... till I reach the center of those lives."[31] In 1976, Pollitt described her skill in this way: "Tyler [is] polishing brighter and brighter a craft many novelists no longer deem essential to their purpose: the unfolding of character through brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail."[2]

  Twelve years later, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of Breathing Lessons, praised "[Tyler's] ability to select details that reveal precisely how her characters feel and think" and her "gift for sympathy, for presenting each character's case with humor and compassion."[32] Kakutani later went on to note that "each character in Saint Maybe has been fully rendered, fleshed out with a palpable interior life, and each has been fit, like a hand-sawed jigsaw-puzzle piece, into the matrix of family life."[33] Carol Shields, also writing about her characters, observes: "Tyler has always put her characters to work. Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves. She also allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption."[34]

  Tyler has spoken about the importance of her characters to her stories: "As far as I'm concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot, too."[5] In a 1977 interview, she stated that "the real joy of writing is how people can surprise one. My people wander around my study until the novel is done. It's one reason I'm very careful not to write about people I don't like. If I find somebody creeping in that I'm not really fond of, I usually take him out."[5] Pollitt had even earlier noted how Tyler's characters seem to take on a life of their own that she doesn't seem to totally control: "Her complex, crotchety inventions surprise us, but one senses they surprise her too."[2]

  Realism through details
  Just as Tyler is difficult to categorize as a novelist, it is also challenging to label her style. Novelist Cathleen Schine describes how her "style without a style" manages to pull the reader into the story: "So rigorous and artful is the style without a style, so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative and experience the work as something real and natural -- even inevitable."[3] The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar point: "One does not so much read a Tyler novel as visit it. Her ability to conduct several conversations at once while getting the food to the table turns the act of reading into a kind of transport."[35] Reviewer Tom Shone put it this way: "You're involved before you ever notice you were paying attention."[36] Joyce Carol Oates, in her review of The Amateur Marriage, perhaps described the phenomenon best: "When the realistic novel works its magic, you won't simply have read about the experiences of fictitious characters, you will have seemed to have lived them; your knowledge of their lives transcends their own, for they can only live in chronological time. The experience of reading such fiction when it's carefully composed can be breathtaking, like being given the magical power of reliving passages of our own lives, indecipherable at the time of being lived."[37]

  Focus on family and marriage
  While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories. Liesl Schillinger summarized: "Taken together, the distinct but overlapping worlds of her novels have formed a Sensurround literary record of the 20th century American family—or, at least, of the proud but troubled archetypal families that ... interested her most."[38] New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has been reviewing Tyler's novels for over 25 years. She has frequently noted Tyler's themes with regard to family and marriage. Reviewing Noah's Compass, Kakutani states that "the central concern of most of this author's characters has always been their need to define themselves in terms of family — the degree to which they see themselves as creatures shaped by genetics, childhood memories and parental and spousal expectations, and the degree to which they are driven to embrace independent identities of their own.".[39] This is an example of where Anne Tyler got some of her characteristics from, being able to be independent and get to know herself through her writing.

  Reviewing Saint Maybe, Jay Parini describes how Tyler's characters must deal with "Ms. Tyler's oddball families, which any self-respecting therapist would call 'dysfunctional' ... An inexplicable centripetal force hurls these relatives upon one another, catches them in a dizzying inward spiral of obligation, affection and old-fashioned guilt—as well as an inexpressible longing for some perfect or "normal" family in a distant past that never really was. Almost every novel by Anne Tyler begins with a loss or absence that reactivates in the family some primordial sense of itself."[40] Larry McMurtry wrote, "in book after book, siblings are drawn inexorably back home, as if their parents or (more often) grandparents had planted tiny magnets in them which can be activated once they have seen what the extrafamilial world is like. ... sooner or later a need to be with people who are really familiar – their brothers and sisters – overwhelms them."[41]

  Novelist Julia Glass has similarly written about Tyler's characters' families: "What makes each story distinctive is the particular way its characters rebel against hereditary confines, cope with fateful crises or forge relationships with new acquaintances who rock their world."[42] In the same way, Glass mentions the frequent role of marriage struggles in her work: "Once again, Tyler exhibits her genius for the incisive, savory portrayal of marriage, of the countless perverse ways in which two individuals sustain a shared existence."[42] McMurtry puts it this way, "The fates of [Tyler's] families hinge on long struggles between semiattentive males and semiobsessed females. In her patient investigation of such struggles, Miss Tyler has produced a very satisfying body of fiction.[41]

  Passage of time and the role of small, chance events
  The role of the passage of time and its impact on Tyler's characters is always present. The stories in many of her novels span decades, if only by flashbacks. Joyce Carol Oates emphasized the role of time in this manner: "[Tyler's novels] move at times as if plotless in the meandering drift of actual life, it is time itself that constitutes "plot": meaning is revealed through a doubling-back upon time in flashes of accumulated memory, those heightened moments which James Joyce aptly called epiphanies. The minutiae of family life can yield a startling significance seen from the right perspective, as Tyler shows us."[37] With regard to those minutiae, Tyler herself comments: "As for huge events vs. small events: I believe they all count. They all reveal character, which is the factor that most concerns me ... It does fascinate me, though, that small details can be so meaningful."[31]

  Kakutani described Saint Maybe in a similar manner: "Moving back and forth among the points of view of various characters, Ms. Tyler traces two decades in the lives of the Bedloes, showing us the large and small events that shape family members' lives and the almost imperceptible ways in which feelings of familial love and obligation mutate over the years."[33] Again in her review of Breathing Lessons, Kakutani perceives that "she is able, with her usual grace and magnanimity, to chronicle the ever-shifting covenants made by parents and children, husbands and wives, and in doing so, to depict both the losses – and redemptions – wrought by the passage of time."[32] Tyler herself further weighs in upon how small events can impact relationships: "I love to think about chance -- about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe ... The real heroes to me in my books are first the ones who manage to endure."[43]

  Criticism
  Tyler is not without her critics. The most common criticism is that her works are "sentimental," "sweet," and "charming and cosy."[6] John Blades, literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, skewered The Accidental Tourist (as well as all her earlier novels) as "artificially sweet" and "unrealistic."[44] The Observer's Adam Mars-Jones stated, in his review of The Amateur Marriage: "Tyler seems to be offering milk and cookies."[45] Kakutani has also occasionally bemoaned a "cloying cuteness," noting that "her novels—with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots—have often flirted with cuteness."[46]

  In a 2012 interview, Tyler responded to such criticisms: "For one thing I think it is sort of true. I would say piss and vinegar for [Philip] Roth and for me milk and cookies. I can't deny it ... [However] there's more edge under some of my soft language than people realize."[6] Because almost all of Tyler's work covers the same territory—family and marriage relationships—and are located in the same setting, she has come under criticism for being repetitive and formulaic.[44][46] Reviewing The Patchwork Planet, Kakutani states: "Ms. Tyler's earlier characters tended to be situated within a thick matrix of finely nuanced familial relationships that helped define both their dreams and their limitations; the people in this novel, in contrast, seem much more like lone wolves, pulled this way and that by the author's puppet strings ... Ms. Tyler's famous ability to limn the daily minutiae of life also feels weary and formulaic this time around ... As for the little details Ms. Tyler sprinkles over her story ... they, too, have a paint-by-numbers touch. They add up to a patchwork novel that feels hokey, mechanical ... and yes, too cute.[46]

  Tyler has also been criticized for her male characters' "Sad Sack" nature and their "lack of testosterone."[6] Tyler has disagreed with this criticism: "Oh that always bothers me so much. I don't think they are wimps. People are always saying we understand you write about quirky characters, and I think, isn't everybody quirky? If you look very closely at anybody you'll find impediments, women and men both."[6]

  Work habits
  Over the last couple of decades, Tyler has been quite forthcoming about her work habits—both in written articles and in interviews. She is very disciplined and consistent about her work schedule and environment. She starts work in the early morning and generally works until 2 pm. Since she moved to the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, she has used a small, orderly corner room in her house, where the only distractions are the sounds of "children playing outside and birds."[5][6] She has noted that at the beginning of her day, taking the first step—that is, entering her corner room—can be difficult and daunting. She begins her writing by reviewing her previous days' work and then by sitting and staring off into space for a time. She describes this phase of writing as an "extension of daydreaming," and it focuses on her characters.[5]

  Over the years Tyler has kept files of note cards in which ideas and observations have been recorded. Characters, descriptions, and scenes often emerge from these notes.[5][14] She says the act of putting words to paper for her is a "very mechanical process," involving a number of steps: (1) writing first in long hand on unlined paper, (2) revising long hand versions, (3) typing the entire manuscript, (4) re-writing in long hand, (5) reading into a tape-recorder while listening for "false notes," (6) playing back into a stenographer's machine using the pause button to enter changes.[6] She can be quite organized, going so far as to map out floor plans of houses and to outline the chronology of all the characters in a given novel.[6]

  In 2013, Tyler gave the following advice to beginning writers: "They should run out and buy the works of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who studied the meaning of gesture in personal interactions. I have cause to think about Erving Goffman nearly every day of my life, every time I see people do something unconscious that reveals more than they'll ever know about their interiors. Aren't human beings intriguing? I could go on writing about them forever."[31]

  Bibliography
  Novels
  If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
  The Tin Can Tree (1965)
  A Slipping-Down Life (1970)
  The Clock Winder (1972)
  Celestial Navigation (1974)
  Searching for Caleb (1975)
  Earthly Possessions (1977)
  Morgan's Passing (1980)
  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
  The Accidental Tourist (1985)
  Breathing Lessons (1988)
  Saint Maybe (1991)
  Ladder of Years (1995)
  A Patchwork Planet (1998)
  Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
  The Amateur Marriage (2004)
  Digging to America (2006)
  Noah's Compass (2009)
  The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
  A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)[47]
  Vinegar Girl (2016)
  Clock Dance (2018)
  Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
  French Braid (2022)
  Three Days in June (2025)
  Other
  Tumble Tower (1993) A children's book illustrated by her daughter Mitra Modarressi
  Timothy Tugbottom Says No! (2005) A children's book illustrated by Mitra Modarressi
  Short stories
  Although Tyler's short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, McCall's, and Harper's, they have not been published as a collection. Her stories include:

  "Laura," Archive, March 1959
  "Lights on the River," Archive, October 1959
  "The Bridge," Archive, March 1960
  "I Never Saw Morning," Archive, April 1961
  "The Baltimore Birth Certificate," The Critic, February-March 1963
  "I Play Kings," Seventeen, August 1963
  "A Street of Bugles," The Saturday Evening Post, November 30, 1963
  "Nobody Answers the Door," The Antioch Review 24.3, Autumn 1964
  "Dry Water," The Southern Review, Spring 1965
  "I'm Not Going to Ask You Again," Harper's, September 1965
  "The Saints in Caesar's Household," Archive, September 1966
  "As the Earth Gets Old," The New Yorker, October 29, 1966
  "Two People and a Clock on the Wall," The New Yorker, November 19, 1966
  "The Tea-Machine," The Southern Review 3.1, Winter 1967
  "The Genuine Fur Eyelashes," Mademoiselle, January 1967
  "The Tea-Machine," The Southern Review, Winter 1967
  "The Feather Behind the Rock," The New Yorker, August 12, 1967
  "A Flaw in the Crust of the Earth," The Reporter, November 2, 1967
  "Who Would Want a Little Boy?" Ladies Home Journal, May 1968
  "The Common Courtesies," McCall's, June 1968—and The O. Henry Prize Stories 1969
  "With All Flags Flying," Redbook, June 1971—and The O. Henry Prize Stories 1972
  "Outside," Southern Review 7.4, Autumn 1971
  "The Bride in the Boatyard," McCall's, June 1972
  "Respect," Mademoiselle, June 1972
  "A Misstep of the Mind," Seventeen, October 1972
  "Spending," Shenandoah, Winter 1973
  "The Base-Metal Egg," The Southern Review, Summer 1973
  "Neutral Ground," Family Circle, November 1974
  "Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles," Cosmopolitan, December 1974
  "A Knack for Languages," The New Yorker, January 13, 1975
  "The Artificial Family," The Southern Review, Summer 1975
  "The Geologist's Maid," The New Yorker, July 28, 1975
  "Some Sign That I Ever Made You Happy," McCall's, October 1975
  "Your Place Is Empty," The New Yorker, November 22, 1976—and Best American Short Stories 1977
  "Holding Things Together", The New Yorker, January 24, 1977
  "Average Waves in Unprotected Waters," The New Yorker, February 28, 1977
  "Under the Bosom Tree," Archive, Spring 1977
  "Foot-Footing On," Mademoiselle, November 1977
  "Uncle Ahmad," Quest, November–December 1977
  "Teenage Wasteland," Seventeen, November 1983
  "Rerun," The New Yorker, July 4, 1988
  "A Woman Like a Fieldstone House," Ladies' Home Journal, August 1989
  "People Who Don't Know the Answers," The New Yorker, August 26, 1991
  Film adaptations
  The Accidental Tourist (1988)
  Breathing Lessons (TV) (1994)
  Saint Maybe (TV) (1998)
  A Slipping-Down Life (1999)
  Earthly Possessions (TV) (1999)
  Back When We Were Grownups (TV) (2004)
  Awards
  Tyler has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1983.[48]

  for Morgan's Passing (1980):

  Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction
  nominated, American Book Award for Fiction
  nominated, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
  for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982):

  Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award
  Finalist, American Book Award for Fiction
  for The Accidental Tourist (1985):

  1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
  1986 Ambassador Book Award for Fiction
  Finalist, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  for Breathing Lessons (1988):

  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1989)
  Time's "Book of the Year"
  for Ladder of Years (1995):

  Finalist, The Orange Prize for Fiction 1996
  for Digging to America (2006):

  Finalist, The Orange Prize for Fiction 2007
  for A Spool of Blue Thread (2015):

  Finalist, The Man Booker Prize 2015
  Finalist, The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2015
  for Redhead By the Side of the Road (2020):

  Longlist, The Man Booker Prize 2020
  for Lifetime achievement:

  Finalist, The Man Booker International Prize 2011
  The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence 2012

• Anne Tyler website - https://annetyler.com

  ANNE TYLER was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels. Her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

• All Things Considered - https://www.npr.org/2022/03/22/1088097171/author-anne-tyler-on-writing-her-24th-novel-and-why-she-writes-about-families

  Author Anne Tyler on writing her 24th novel and why she writes about families
  March 22, 20224:51 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  By

  Mary Louise Kelly

  ,

  Elena Burnett

  ,

  Courtney Dorning

  7-Minute Listen
  Transcript
  NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with writer Anne Tyler about her 24th novel French Braid. Set in Baltimore, the book tracks one family, the Garretts, across decades and generations

  Sponsor Message

  JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

  In other parts of the program, you'll hear our co-host Mary Louise Kelly reporting from Tbilisi. But before she headed out, Mary Louise recorded this interview with author Anne Tyler.

  MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

  The majority of Anne Tyler's 24 books are about family. And the majority of Anne's Tyler's 24 books are set in Baltimore. Now, if we were talking about any other writer, you would be excused for wondering if they might be stuck in a rut. But Tyler's gift is that each story, each character is distinct, even as she builds on themes from one book to the next. Tyler's new novel, "French Braid," is set, you guessed it, in Baltimore. And it tracks one family, the Garretts, across decades and across generations. Anne Tyler, Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

  ANNE TYLER: Well, thank you.

  KELLY: I've got to start by asking, are you stuck in a rut? Or what is it about writing about families and Baltimore families that keeps bringing you back there over and over in your work?

  TYLER: Well, I am stuck in a rut.

  (LAUGHTER)

  TYLER: I mean, actually. I say - every time I start a new book, I say, well, this is going to be different. And it generally is not. I think that what I love when I'm writing about families is that you get to see these people grating along together that can't very easily leave each other. And they have to show their true colors, like, as I always say, like people on a desert island or in a burning building, where their real selves come out. Sometimes people do split up. Families do split up. But generally, it's a matter of endurance, which is, I think, the quality in human beings that interests me the most.

  KELLY: Yeah. Describe this family, the Garrets of Baltimore. The dad is Robin. The mom is Mercy. They've got three kids, two daughters and a son. What do we need to know about this family?

  TYLER: Well, at the beginning, all we know about them is that although they have no great cataclysmic disruptions in their relationships with each other, they just aren't connected anymore, so much so that at the beginning, somebody who sees her cousin in the train station is not exactly sure that he is her cousin. She just thinks he looks sort of familiar. And the question is - how did that happen? What leads families to get to this stage?

  KELLY: Yeah. Well, speaking of not being connected, I don't think I'm giving too much away if I share that the mom, Mercy, moves out of the family house when the last kid goes to college. But she never divorces her husband, Robin. The two sisters, Alice and Lily - they call each other; they talk to each other; but they don't actually seem to like each other that much.

  TYLER: Right.

  KELLY: I wondered - in a way, you're showing us how they are not connected, but you're also maybe - am I right in thinking you're showing us that love can be expressed through the things we choose not to say, through the places we choose not to be?

  TYLER: I think you're putting it very well. That's exactly the case, I think. For instance, the mother who basically is separated from the father as time goes on and leads more and more her own life, she knows the thing he's been scared of all his life is divorce. And she's very careful never, ever, ever to mention the word divorce. And everything is just fine as far as the outside world knows, even as far as the two of them know.

  KELLY: Yeah. But to your point that that's the thing he's always been scared of, when she tells him she needs some space, she's going to be sleeping somewhere else, he says, I couldn't bear it if you left me. And she says, I'm not going to leave you, ever. I promise. Does she keep that promise?

  TYLER: Well, in a way, yes. In a way, no. I enjoyed writing about her. Sometimes I was so mad at her. Weirdly enough, I think the time I was maddest was just her general behavior toward a cat.

  KELLY: The cat got me, too. Can we just explain what happened with the cat? She inherits this cat.

  TYLER: She inherits it. She doesn't want it. But she's being kind to somebody who desperately needs his cat taken care of. And as time goes on, the cat and she develop a relationship, but she always thinks he's going to go away finally. And when he doesn't, when it turns out, oh, no, this cat is just going to have to stay with you - well, the first thing I did when I was writing this was that I thought, all right, that's going to be one situation in which she does sort of stick with an obligation to another being. And every way I wrote it, it just didn't work. And finally, I had to say, well, I think she's going to get rid of that cat. And I just - I was just heartbroken about it. But there you go.

  KELLY: She does promise the cat's owner, yes, I'll take care of it. Don't worry at all. And then the second he leaves, she drives it up to the animal shelter...

  TYLER: Yes.

  KELLY: ...And dumps it in the crate in the parking lot. And I felt - I'm not surprised to hear that you were mad as heck at her because somehow that betrayal felt more infuriating than leaving the husband.

  TYLER: Yes. I don't know why that is. It's odd (laughter).

  KELLY: May I say something that strikes me as I listen to you speak? You're talking about your characters as though they're real people that you can't control, like...

  TYLER: Oh, I can't.

  (LAUGHTER)

  KELLY: You could make Mercy, the mom, nicer. She's - you invented her.

  TYLER: Yes. I know. I'm just trying to make you not blame me for what she did with the cat.

  KELLY: (Laughter).

  TYLER: But, no, I've always felt when I begin a book, it's so artificial, and I am so clumsy, and it's a manufactured lie I'm telling. And usually, about a chapter and a half into it, I'm sort of pushing these people around on the page. And it's a matter of dialogue sometimes, but I'll think of a sentence - one sentence - and then it just seems very natural that the other one would say such and such, although, in fact, I didn't invent that. It's just that the characters suddenly just take on their lives. And then I do feel as if, oh, I'm getting to know so-and-so. I had no idea that she had such and such in her life.

  KELLY: Yeah. You said that "A Spool Of Blue Thread" was going to be your last novel. And that, if I'm not mistaken, came out seven years ago. And you've - this is your fourth that you've written since then. What changed?

  TYLER: Oh, yes, yes. Well, I always feel I have to explain that I didn't mean that I was never going to write again. What I was thinking is, I am going to just write this same novel forever because I'm happiest when I'm in the middle of a book. So at the time that I was saying this, I was writing "A Spool Of Blue Thread," and I thought, there's really no need for any more books from me, but I'm so happy writing this one that I will just endlessly revise it. I'll keep on going. I'll add generations - which is why, by the way, that book basically runs backwards. And what I didn't bargain on is that finally I was just done. I lost interest in an earlier generation that didn't have a lot of depth to it. And then, of course, what am I going to do with the rest of my life but write another novel?

  KELLY: Well, Anne Tyler, I hope that you continue writing the same novel over and over so that we can continue reading it.

  (LAUGHTER)

  TYLER: Well, thank you. That's a very nice wish. I really like that one (laughter).

  KELLY: Well, I really loved this book. Thank you so much for speaking with us.

  TYLER: Oh, I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you.

  KELLY: Anne Tyler - she is the author most recently of "French Braid." It's out today.

  (SOUNDBITE OF THE NEW WEST GUITAR GROUP'S "CROOKED RAILROAD")

  SUMMERS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

• People - https://people.com/books/novelist-anne-tyler-is-still-on-top-of-her-game-at-80-i-wouldnt-want-to-be-younger-for-a-million-bucks/

  Novelist Anne Tyler Is Still on Top of Her Game at 80: 'I Wouldn't Want to Be Younger for a Million Bucks'
  Critics are loving her 24th novel, French Braid, out this month, but Tyler only knows that if you tell her

  By Kim Hubbard Published on March 24, 2022 10:54AM EDT
  Author Anne Tyler
  Anne Tyler. Photo: Candace Dane Chambers
  Anne Tyler has been writing beloved, bestselling novels since 1964, so she has a pretty clear sense of her audience. "If you love a good war story, you won't be remotely interested in my books," she says, in a rare interview from her home in Baltimore. "Nothing's going on in them except time passing, and people being who they are."

  Her 24th, French Braid, is out this month, and it's no exception. The story of a Baltimore family drifting apart over several generations, it's hardly plot-free. But even the central drama — a wife leaving her husband to live in her painting studio — happens so gradually that everyone, husband and grown kids included, can pretend the marriage is still intact. "I always say families are my version of survivors on a desert island — they're forced to be together," Tyler says. "You can break up with your family but it's not easily done. Family is the ultimate test of endurance."

  Critics are loving it, as usual, though Tyler only knows that if you tell her. "I'd be very upset if I got horrible reviews, which is why I don't read reviews," she says. "For several years I thought, 'The world does not need another of my books.' What if people are saying, the woman doesn't know when to quit?" Not that she plans to. "What else would I do?" says Tyler, who's lived alone in Baltimore, her home of more than 50 years, since her husband died in 1997, and has two daughters. "I'm not wildly social and I have no hobbies. I write in order to feel what it would be like to be somebody else. Maybe my readers are the kind of people who want to sink into another life in the same way."

  Anne Tyler
  The author with her family in 1970.
  Tyler first began escaping into her own stories as a child, perhaps partly in response to her "much too emotional, much too unpredictable" mother. "I don't mean to throw her under the bus here, but she just had a very bad temper," she says. "My brother remembers his childhood as, every morning he would tiptoe to the door of her bedroom and peek in to see what kind of day it was going to be. And you know, you are at the mercy of your mother at that age."

  Where the Crawdads Sing: Haunting First Trailer Features New Music from Taylor Swift — Watch
  The family spent Anne's early years in a Quaker commune in the hills of North Carolina, where her mom homeschooled her and her three younger brothers while her father, a chemist, provided a "stable, kind" counterpart. "He knew how things worked," Tyler says. "I love that kind of man."

  French Braid by Anne Tyler
  French Braid by Anne Tyler.
  At 21, she chose a man of science 21 years older as her husband. Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian immigrant and child psychiatrist, shared her interest in human beings' inner lives. "It's just pure blind luck that I married exactly, exactly the right person for me," she says. She earned a degree in Russian studies from Duke but chose writing as her path. Her first big his was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1982, and — with the exception of a five-year hiatus when her daughters were young — the books kept coming. "Just churning them out, as my next-door neighbor once said," she says with a laugh.

  For more on Anne Tyler, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

  She found motherhood suited her as much as writing did. "My concern when I had children was, how am I going to stop myself from, you know, flailing out and slapping people and stuff?" she says. "It's like I didn't have that gene after all. It was such a relief. Oh, I loved motherhood. I really did. I would now say what every annoying old lady said to me: 'Oh, they grow so fast.' It doesn't last! Nobody knows how very short a time you're a mother."

  She and Taghi made a quiet life for themselves and their girls. Famous for her seeming reclusiveness, Tyler says her avoidance of interviews was more about protecting her craft. "If I'm forced to confront the fact that people are reading my writing, it makes me very self-conscious about the writing I'm doing at the time. I probably speak more openly to you because I'm not busy writing a book right now. In other words, I'm not going to ruin my writing by talking about my writing."

  THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST
  Geena Davis won an Oscar for her role opposite William Hurt in the 1988 film of Tyler’s novel The Accidental Tourist, about a grieving travel writer and the dog trainer who saves him. Everett
  When Taghi died of lymphoma at age 65, it leveled her. "There will never be anything that hard again," she says, her voice tightening. "I never thought I would have to go 25 years without Taghi."

  Yet she has managed. She spends most of her time writing, seeing a couple of friends "for a hot cider every Tuesday" now that COVID numbers are lower. Soon she may return to pre-pandemic dinners with Hairspray director John Waters, whom she adores. "He'd probably kill me for saying this, but I find him a very sweet man. The gender-neutral bathrooms at the Baltimore Museum of Art have just been dedicated to him! So very proud of him."

  Her daughters (Tezh, 56, a Philadelphia-based artist, and Mitra, 54, a San Francisco area children's book writer and illustrator) and two grandchildren recently visited, a lovely respite from her pandemic isolation. And while she doesn't think of herself as a role model for successful aging ("Oh gosh, no!"), she's inspiring in spite of herself. "I wouldn't want to be younger for a million bucks," she says. "On both sides of my family there has been one person with Alzheimers. I don't want to get too old. There are problems with age, but we're wiser and more accepting, you know? It's falling into place how the world works."

  "I'm interested in how people endure," she adds. "Including me."

• London Independent - https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/books/features/anne-tyler-clock-dance-novel-author-writer-baltimore-a8434446.html

  Anne Tyler interview: 'I had no intention of becoming a writer'
  The Pulitzer-winner used to hate giving interviews – but now she is opening up about her work, her inspiration, and why she just keeps returning to the subject of human endurance

  Charles McGrath
  Saturday 07 July 2018 06:34 EDT
  Comments

  The reclusive author counts Jodi Picoult, Emma Donoghue and Nick Hornby among her fans
  open image in gallery
  The reclusive author counts Jodi Picoult, Emma Donoghue and Nick Hornby among her fans (Getty)
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  Read more
  The novelist Anne Tyler, whose 22nd novel, Clock Dance, is release next week, has been around for so long, reliably turning out books of such consistently high quality, that it is easy to take her a little for granted. Oddballs, misfits, sad sacks, melancholy, messed-up families — by now we know, or think we know, exactly what we are going to get.

  Nor has Tyler made much of an effort to publicise herself. She does not do book tours, rarely gives interviews. She does not need to. She has a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award and legions of satisfied fans, among them writers like Jodi Picoult, Emma Donoghue, Nick Hornby. John Updike, another admirer, once said that she was not just good but “wickedly good”.

  Tyler is not a recluse, exactly – or, as one critic called her, the Greta Garbo of the literary world – but she is a creature of rigorous habit, rooted in Baltimore, her home for the last 51 years and one she seldom leaves. She does not do interviews, because she dislikes the way they make her feel the next morning.

  “I’ll go upstairs to my writing room to do my regular stint of work,” she said recently, “and I’ll probably hear myself blathering on about writing and I won’t do a very good job that day. I always say that the way you write a novel is for the first 83 drafts you pretend that nobody is ever, ever going to read it.”

  So why is she sitting in front of a voice recorder now? “I don’t know.” She laughs. “Maybe because I’m getting old and easier to push around.”

  Suburban Baltimore, where Tyler has lived for more than 50 years, serves as the backdrop to her novels
  open image in gallery
  Suburban Baltimore, where Tyler has lived for more than 50 years, serves as the backdrop to her novels (PA)
  For the last 10 years, since her husband died and her children moved away, Tyler, who is 75 now but looks much younger, has lived in a high-end Rouse development on the edge of Baltimore’s leafy Roland Park neighbourhood. Her house is almost disturbingly neat. The upstairs writing room is so uncluttered and antiseptic you could safely perform surgery there, and what actually takes place at her desk is only a little less complicated.

  She writes in longhand, draft after draft, and when she has a section she is satisfied with, types it into a computer. When she has a completed draft she prints it out and then rewrites it all in longhand again, and that version she reads out loud into a dictaphone. The result is a style that she modestly calls no style at all, but is nevertheless unmistakably hers: transparent and alert to all the nuances of the seemingly ordinary.

  Tyler, who is as unpretentious as most of her characters, insists that she did not set out to be a writer and is still a little surprised that she became one. Her parents were Quakers and conscientious objectors, and until she was 11 she grew up in a commune in the mountains of North Carolina.

  “I can perfectly remember my childhood, but nothing else,” she says. “I remember when I was seven, making crucial decisions about the kind of person I was going to be. That’s also the age when I figured out that, oh, someday I’m going to die, and the age when I decided I couldn’t believe in God.”

  She smiles. “I’ve never been as intelligent as I was at seven. I have never been as thoughtful or as introspective.”

  Her new book explores what it means to be part of a family (Chatto & Windus)
  open image in gallery
  Her new book explores what it means to be part of a family (Chatto & Windus) (Chatto & Windus)
  As a child she read a lot – sometimes books like Little Women over and over again – but even in high school it never occurred to her to be a writer, because she was assigned books like Silas Marner, and Julius Caesar and she knew she could never write like that. When she was 14, living outside of Raleigh, she had a revelation when she read Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories.

  “I was handling tobacco in the summers,” she recalls, explaining that her job was passing tobacco leaves to someone who tied them on sticks for curing. “The stringer was always a black woman, the handers were mostly farm wives and a few teenaged girls. And they talked, talked, talked. It was a real education. I’d go home every night and my arms would be covered in tar up to my elbows, which tells you something.

  “I realised the people Welty was writing about were country people just like the people I was handling tobacco with. I was just flabbergasted. I said, she’s writing my life, people I know, and it’s not Shakespearean English. She’s just telling what’s real out there that she sees. Later I even got to know her. She was like her stories. There was something wondering about her as she spoke, as if she was marvelling at everything she looked at.”

  Welty notwithstanding, Tyler went to Duke University, North Carolina, and majored in Russian, not because of any particular interest in that language or its literature, but because she “just wanted to do everything different from my parents.” She says, “If I could have majored in outer space I would have.” This was at the height of the Cold War and another thing that greatly appealed to her was that the head of the Russian department had a personal FBI agent trailing him around.

  “I still had no intention of becoming a writer,” she recalled. “I had a series of really good high school English teachers, then an English professor at Duke, and then Reynolds Price, who taught writing there, and every single one of them would say, you’re really good, you ought to be a writer, and I’d just say OK. I wanted to be an artist, though it’s just as well I’m not. I honestly sometimes think to this day, I wonder what I’m going to be?”

  Baltimore was also unplanned. Tyler moved there from Montreal in 1967 because her husband, Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian child psychiatrist, was offered a job at a hospital there, and at first she hated it. “Now I don’t know where else I would live. It’s a very kindhearted city, friendly and gentle. That sounds ironic to say but it’s true.” Almost all her books have been set there.

  'Every time I begin a book I think this one is going to be completely different, and then it isn’t'
  open image in gallery
  'Every time I begin a book I think this one is going to be completely different, and then it isn’t' (AP)
  For the most part the Baltimore she writes about – a place part real, part imaginary – could not be less like the neighbourhood she actually lives in. The Baltimore of Tyler’s novels is mostly middle class, or even working class — a place of crowded streets and small houses whose first stories sometimes double as offices for podiatrists and insurance agencies, and where people are probably a little kinder than they are elsewhere.

  Clock Dance, Tyler’s fans will mostly be relieved to know, is hardly a departure. It is almost a compendium of familiar Tyler tropes and situations. It mostly takes place in Baltimore, though the main character is not from there.

  There is a difficult mother and some estranged siblings, just as in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; a marriage of mutual (and perhaps deliberate) misunderstanding, as in Breathing Lessons; and, above all, a curious exploration of what it means to be part of a family. Some of the characters watch a TV show called Space Junk, which is practically an emblem of the novel; it is about some aliens who kidnap random earthlings on the assumption that they must be related and then try to figure out why they behave the way they do.

  “Every time I begin a book I think this one is going to be completely different, and then it isn’t,” Tyler says. “I would like to have something new and different, but have never had the ambition to completely change myself. If I try to think of some common thread, I really think I’m deeply interested in endurance. I don’t think living is easy, even for those of us who aren’t scrounging. It’s hard to get through every day and say there’s a good reason to get up tomorrow. It just amazes me that people do it, and so cheerfully.

  “The clearest way that you can show endurance is by sticking with a family. It’s easy to dump a friend, but you can’t so easily dump a brother. How did they stick together, and what goes on when they do? – all those things just fascinate me.”

  She has no plan to retire. “What happens is six months go by after I finish a book,” she says “and I start to go out of my mind. I have no hobbies, I don’t garden, I hate travel. The impetus is not inspiration, just a feeling that I better do this.

  “There’s something addictive about leading another life at the same time you’re living your own.” She pauses and adds “If you think about it, it’s a very strange way to make a living.”

• London Times - https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/anne-tyler-what-am-i-going-to-do-with-my-life-im-only-80-fcpcjrkw3?region=global

  Anne Tyler: ‘What am I going to do with my life? I’m only 80!’
  As her 24th novel comes out, America’s Jane Austen says she never intended to become a writer
  Depth of character: Anne Tyler
  Depth of character: Anne Tyler
  LEXEY SWALL
  Sarah Baxter
  Sunday March 20 2022, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
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  Today's Quizle

  Q:Which bird native to Britain can lay an egg in 10 seconds?

  Test your knowledge
  Anne Tyler’s books don’t feel like novels. Reading them you feel more like you are in the middle of someone’s life. The people she chronicles are so real you can almost touch them, yet her stories are far removed from the clash of contemporary events. She has been heralded as the Jane Austen of our age, making up for what her novels lack in plot with rich emotional drama — and a new Anne Tyler is always an event. French Braid, which comes out on Tuesday, is Tyler’s 24th novel and eagerly anticipated, even though the Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist is the last person on earth to make a noise about her books. “I’m not particularly rooted in the outside world,” Tyler, who is 80, tells me.

  She gives few interviews — until 2012 her UK publisher had only met her once, for a lunch. Although when she does make a public appearance it is packed to the rafters with passionate readers (Nick Hornby is one of her many literary admirers).

  We are meeting at Tyler’s light-filled home in Baltimore, the setting for most of her books. She has come to love the hardscrabble city made famous by the TV crime drama The Wire, although she didn’t always feel that way. When she moved there in 1965 with her husband, Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian child psychiatrist and novelist, she felt very isolated.

  20_CUL_ANNE1
  “We rented a home in a stodgy neighbourhood where old ladies lived in six-bedroom houses,” she explains. “One neighbour would lean out of the window and yell, ‘Iranians go home!’ I didn’t have any friends until my daughters went to school.

  “I had always wanted to time travel,” she adds. “I came to think of Baltimore as a time machine, that I was just taking a look and wouldn’t be here for ever. But now I see I’m here for life. It has got so much grit and character.”

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  Beneath her gentle demeanour Tyler has a steely core. She dislikes the term “cancel culture”, but she is horrified by its implications for literature. “I’m astonished by the appropriation issue,” she says. “It would be very foolish for me to write, let’s say, a novel from the viewpoint of a black man, but I think I should be allowed to do it.

  “If an incredibly talented person has written novels in the 1930s or 40s and all of a sudden it is discovered that there was something he said or did — even something as bad as sexual harassment — he should be condemned for it,” she adds, “but I don’t see why you should withdraw his novels from publication.

  “My plots are just time, if you think about it. I would love to have a real plot”
  “My plots are just time, if you think about it. I would love to have a real plot”
  LEXEY SWALL
  “We couldn’t look at Gauguin’s paintings, could we? They would have to be destroyed or put away.” Later I notice she has Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita on her shelves. I ask whether anybody has suggested she shouldn’t have a male leading character, as in The Accidental Tourist, one of her best-loved books (which became a Hollywood film, starring the late William Hurt). “No, but I expect it to happen any day now,” she replies.

  Writing is her life, but Tyler regards herself as something of an accidental novelist — she began her first when she was stuck at home without a job. “I never planned to be a writer at all. For years, maybe even today, sometimes I think, ‘What exactly am I going to do with my life? What is my career going to be? I’m only 80, for God’s sake!”

  Her novels explore families with big secrets and small lies. Parents and children rub along irritably, awkwardly and tenderly. “I am fascinated by endurance,” she says. “Human beings really do lead lives of quiet desperation. It’s admirable really. Families are basically the only group that can’t easily split up. It is my version of a disaster movie, you put people in a burning building and see how they behave under duress.”

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  There has been a bit of a ballyhoo that French Braid mentions Covid-19, but it is a stretch to describe it as a “pandemic-themed” novel, as did The New York Times.

  20_CUL_ANNE2
  “My plots are just time, if you think about it,” she says. “Time passes and eventually somebody will die and somebody will get married. I would love to have a real plot.” I am not convinced. One of her characters says they don’t like murder mysteries because “I don’t care whodunnit”. True, she laughs. “I don’t care whodunnit. It happened. What can I say? They’re dead!”

  In French Braid Mercy has cast aside her longing to be an artist until her children have grown up. Then, bit by bit, she eases herself out of the family home into a clutter-free studio, leaving her good-hearted, salt-of-the-earth husband behind. “Sometimes people live first one life and then another life,” Mercy tells her grandchild. “First a family life then a whole other kind of life. That’s what I’m doing.”

  The story echoes Ladder of Years, in which a woman walks out on her family during a beach holiday. “I got so many letters from people saying, ‘I always wanted to do that,’ ” Tyler says. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, my favourite novel, Pearl, the family matriarch, is abandoned by her husband but never finds the right moment to tell the children he has gone. As with a lot of her plot twists, I couldn’t help thinking, “Well, that’s not very likely,” until I suddenly remembered something similar had happened to me. I was five years old and “visiting” Grandma with my mother, when I found myself enrolled in a new school. “If you look closely enough, everybody’s family is strange,” Tyler observes.

  She is not sure her characters’ disappearing acts can work any more. “You wouldn’t believe how much the existence of cell phones has changed plots,” she observes. “You can’t lose touch with somebody as easily as you used to. You can’t lose their phone number, or if you move to a new place everybody still knows how to call you.”

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  Tyler resents the tyranny of availability. “I’ve had actual arguments with my daughters and several friends, because I go for a walk every morning and everybody says I should take my cell phone. I just feel like I want to disconnect, but they nagged me so much that I’ve started putting it in a tiny hanging wallet around my shoulder.”

  Years ago she had a T-shirt with the slogan “One Hundred Years of Solitude”. A woman stopped her and said, “I would love to have that!”, missing the literary reference to Gabriel García Márquez but enjoying the sentiment.

  Perhaps Tyler might have won the Nobel prize for literature too by now if her sphere were not so domestic. When she bought her house she was dismayed to find it had a large basement as she had a horror of filling it up. There is a quiet, airy room upstairs where she writes. Her furniture is tastefully minimalist. She loves art and I think perhaps she is like Mercy, but she demurs.

  20_CUL_ANNE3
  “No, there is none of me in my novels. We all have private, negative feelings we don’t talk about but I don’t think I have secrets.”

  She is close to her daughters, who live on opposite sides of America; Tezh, her eldest, in Philadelphia, and Mitra in San Francisco. Her marriage was extremely happy, even though it began with a casual “Why not?” when Taghi unexpectedly proposed. She was 21. He was “just perfect for me”, but died of lymphoma in 1997. The blows kept coming. A few months later she found out that she had breast cancer, and she was waiting for a double mastectomy when Tezh was diagnosed with a brain tumour. These were frightening times.

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  On Desert Island Discs she described going to the hospital for her surgery with Tezh in a head bandage from hers. Sheep May Safely Graze by Bach — one of her husband’s favourite pieces of music — came on the radio. “It seemed like Taghi was talking to us.”

  She wondered, “How am I going to get through life without him?” but managed, one cup of coffee and other simple steps at a time. Like so many of her characters she was obliged to have a second life on her own. Tyler writes with huge sympathy for men. “I was raised with three brothers — all very good men — and I had a wonderful father,” she says. “I wasn’t so close to my mother. She was unpredictable. You didn’t know if she was going to be angry or not. I trusted men more.”

  Tyler was born in Minnesota, but her early years were spent in a commune in the Appalachian mountains, before her parents settled in Raleigh, North Carolina. The way of life suited her father, a Quaker from birth, but her mother disliked it. “When we left I think it was my mother saying, ‘We can’t do this.’ ”

  Tyler at home in Baltimore
  Tyler at home in Baltimore
  LEXEY SWALL
  Objectively I would say her mother had reason to be cross. The men in her life were pernickety, like Macon in The Accidental Tourist. “Most interesting people are a bit on the spectrum,” Tyler tells me. “Two of my brothers never let their wives fill the dishwasher because ‘they did it all wrong’. I remember my father telling my mother she did it wrong, too, although he didn’t go so far as to take it out of her hands.”

  She describes herself as introverted. “If I am cast into a hugely disorganised, noisy social situation I’m not happy.” Yet she was bold enough to study Russian at Duke University in the early 1960s. Then came her rapid marriage to Taghi. “If that wasn’t an act of rebellion, I don’t know what was. My mother kept saying, ‘Don’t forget he could take many wives.’

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  “ ‘Tell her you’ll always be my favourite one,’ ” he would respond. Taghi, a radical who had left Iran under the shah, discouraged her from learning Farsi — it’s too difficult, he would say — but she secretly taught herself the language. It came in useful on her only trip to Tehran, when she found hundreds of his relatives waiting to greet her at the airport.

  Her novels are deceptive. For a loner Tyler remains deeply engaged in the world. “I wish I weren’t,” she says. “I don’t really sleep much at night and I don’t want to read or get up, so the only thing I can think of is to listen to the BBC news all night long. It’s such a bad idea. There is never any good news.”

  During Donald Trump’s presidency and, later, the storming of the Capitol, “I got my heart broken when I saw the US constitution wasn’t really very well defended.” She continues: “After I hear the news from Ukraine these days I really can’t sleep,” she says. “I so admire the Ukrainians’ courage and the open-heartedness of their neighbours in offering them refuge. And I try to remind myself that a country’s people are not always synonymous with that country’s government — as shown by the many brave Russian citizens risking arrest to protest what is happening.”

  Global warming is another source of anxiety. “I worry I shouldn’t have had children, which of course you can’t really say. I worry our grandchildren won’t thank us.” Imagine a life without children or family entanglements. It would mean a life without Anne Tyler novels. That would never do.

• The Booker Prizes - https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/anne-tyler-qa

  Anne Tyler Q&A
  Anne Tyler, author of the 2020 Booker Prize-longlisted Redhead by The Side of The Road, talks about her writing.

  The second time-longlistee on the inspiration behind Redhead by the Side of the Road, and why there’s no contest when it comes to her favourite Booker Prize winner.

  Publication date and time:Published May 25, 2022
  How does it feel to be longlisted for the second time?

  It feels wonderful, of course, but also it’s kind of a shock. That book covers such a narrow sliver of a life, I didn’t expect it to be given much attention.

  What’s the inspiration behind Redhead by the Side of The Road?

  It’s the only novel I’ve written whose beginning seemed to be dictated to me. The first sentence, and then the second, came out of the blue. After that I was on my own, but at least I’d been given a nudge to start me on my way.

  Your writing demonstrates such affection for your characters. How do you let go of them at the end of the process?

  It does make me sad, but once a book is in print I feel I can say goodbye – as if my characters were children I just needed to see settled in their careers.

  In this novel we witness your protagonist’s careful routine disrupted by a few unexpected events. Why do you feel that chance encounters hold so much fictional potential?

  I like the idea of confronting a cautious person with the chaos of normal life and then watching what he or she does about it.

  What is your favourite Booker-winning novel?

  The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro; no contest. I loved the quiet thud of realisation that fell over the main character at the end of his story. To me it felt as cataclysmic as a bomb.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/15/it-seemed-wrong-to-write-about-normal-life-after-that-horrendous-election-us-novelist-anne-tyler

  Interview
  ‘It seemed wrong to write about normal life after that horrendous election’: US novelist Anne Tyler
  This article is more than 2 months old
  Lisa Allardice
  At 83, The Accidental Tourist author discusses the secret to a good marriage, publishing her 25th book and why she can no longer keep politics out of her novels

  Lisa Allardice
  Sat 15 Feb 2025 04.00 EST
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  “I’m ashamed,” Anne Tyler says of the publication of her new novel, Three Days in June, a typically Tyleresque off‑kilter romantic comedy about a long-divorced, mismatched couple. “I didn’t even realise I was up to 25. If you look at a writer’s work and you see that many titles you think, ‘Well, it can’t be very serious work.’ But that’s what happened.”

  The seriousness of Tyler’s fiction, which includes much-loved novels Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer prize-winning Breathing Lessons, has bothered critics for decades. How could a writer of such witty, warm, kind novels about middle-class families that contain very little historical context, no politics or sex, even, really be one of America’s finest living novelists, as so many have claimed? Not to mention her prodigiousness. The author herself couldn’t give two hoots. Unswayed by literary fashion or criticism, she has been writing the novels that interest her, and her devoted readership, for 60 years. “How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,” she says.

  Now 83, Tyler is on a video call from her Quaker retirement community just outside Baltimore. It is where her parents retired, and by chance, she moved into the house next door a couple of years ago. (She grew up in a Quaker commune in the mountains of North Carolina but describes herself as “a secular Quaker”.) She is framed by a large window that looks out on to trees, white walls and high eaves. “I like to say there are more deer here than people,” she jokes of her rural surroundings. “And I don’t feel any older living here than I did before.” For many years she lived in the Roland Park neighbourhood of Baltimore, where, as Tyler fans will know, most of those 25 novels are set.

  It is 10am there, and she has just seen off her old college roommate, who stayed over the night before. Neat as a pin in a slim grey polo-neck, she looks the same as when we last met 13 years ago, except that her trademark silver fringe is now white. Then, it was a sunny afternoon in Kensington, west London, and her first face-to-face interview in 40 years. Her reluctance to do publicity meant she was often referred to as a JD Salinger-like recluse and on one occasion “the Greta Garbo of the literary world”. Yet it is hard to imagine anyone less prickly than Tyler, who talks with the softest southern accent and smiles with her whole face. She isn’t as “allergic” to interviews as she used to be (and even agreed to Desert Island Discs a couple of years ago), but she still finds them a bit of a pain: “If I talk about writing, I can’t do any writing for some time afterward. I’m too self-conscious,” she explains. “I think I’m shy, to be honest. I hate to admit it as a grownup, but there we are.”

  She is so unassuming, some of her friends don’t even know she is a writer. When she downsized, she didn’t keep a copy of any of her own books. “What would I do with them?” She has them all on a Kindle, but only so she can check if she’s repeating herself. Both her daughters are artists, and now she has so little wall space, it is reserved only for their work. She even got rid of most of her kitchen utensils. “There’s no clutter in my house!” she declares, proudly.

  ‘I’ll write down a single word and use it 40 years later’ … Anne Tyler.
  View image in fullscreen
  ‘I’ll write down a single word and use it 40 years later’ … Anne Tyler. Photograph: André Chung
  One possession that was never in danger of being culled was Tyler’s index card box of ideas: sometimes the outline for whole stories, but mostly just a few words, snatches of conversation. “I’ll write down a single word and use it 40 years later,” she explains. It started out as a royal-blue recipe tin, and when that became overstuffed she upgraded to a bigger, black‑and-white index box and wrote “Blue Box” on the label (a detail that might have come from one of her novels). Before beginning a new book, she takes a dozen or so cards and sees if any of them spark something. It was to the Blue Box she turned for Three Days in June.

  At only 176 pages, the novel is set in Baltimore (naturally) over the three days of the wedding of Debbie Baines, but deftly expands to tell the story of her parents’ failed marriage. Gail Baines is 61 years old and has recently been let go from her job as assistant headteacher because she “lacks people skills”. She likes ironing, cuts her own hair and still has an answering machine because there are too many people she might not feel like talking to. Her ex-husband, Max, is scruffy, unpredictable, “a good man”, the author says affectionately, one of Tyler’s endearingly hapless male characters. “Boundaries; that was his problem. He lacked boundaries. I myself was all about boundaries,” Gail observes. (She might be friends with Elizabeth Strout’s more outspoken Olive Kitteridge up in Maine, although they’d be sure to get on each other’s nerves.) The day before their daughter’s wedding, Max turns up on her doorstep with a stray cat.

  The idea on the index card was along the lines of the famous Sex and the City quote “find someone to love the you you love”, and it is one that she has used before, she admits unapologetically. “There are certain people who bring out the best in us and the worst,” she says. “And it’s wise to marry somebody who brings out the best.”

  Everything I write is about trying to lead a life other than my own
  The general theme of her cards is “‘What would it be like to be that person over there?’” she says. “Everything I write is about trying to lead a life other than my own.” But when she looks back on all her work, she is puzzled that she stayed so close to home. “Why didn’t I write about somebody who went off to climb Everest?” she asks herself. “I don’t know, but that doesn’t interest me so much.”

  As she says, all her novels are domestic, which has led to accusations of sentimentality and blandness. One review called her books “milk and cookies” in contrast to “the astonishing display of piss and vinegar” in Philip Roth. The comparison rings true, Tyler said back in 2012. But there’s clearly some old-fashioned sexism at work: when Updike (one of Tyler’s earliest champions) writes about married life he is “giving the mundane its beautiful due”, as he put it. Yet, arguably, Tyler’s work has endured better than some of those Big American Males, whose novels now leave a slightly bitter taste. “I used to just devour every word of Roth and Updike, and still think very highly of them,” she says. “But as you mentioned their names, I had a slight sense of … Oh, those were the smart alec guys, you know.”

  At its best, Tyler’s work is bittersweet rather than saccharine: when she writes about families, she is writing about how they stay together, “how they grate along”. “I wondered why it was that I had so many irritating people in my life,” Gail muses in the new novel. Tyler’s true subject is endurance, “the most moving quality of human beings”, she says.

  She attributes her many sympathetic male characters to having been “unusually lucky” in being surrounded by decent men growing up: an “amazing father” and three younger brothers (later she would add a “wonderful husband” to the list). Her mother, a social worker, was “difficult”, given to mood swings and unpredictable rages; one of her brothers would check round her bedroom door in the morning to see what sort of day it might be (Tyler now thinks she might have been bi-polar). But she was determined her children would love books. Tyler often credits her early years on the commune with giving her a novelist’s outsider slant on the world.

  When she was 11, the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Tyler attended a proper school for the first time. She won a scholarship to Duke University at 16, where she majored in Russian (the most rebellious thing she could do at the time) and attended creative writing classes taught by the poet and writer Reynolds Price. He immediately recognised her talent and inadvertently influenced some of her most celebrated novels by proclaiming that men can write about women, but women can’t write about men: “I thought, well, I’ll show you, Reynolds!” After a year at Columbia, New York, she returned to Duke to work as a Russian bibliographer in the library, where she met her husband Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian refugee and child psychiatrist, 10 years her senior.

  They were married for 34 years until, in 1997, Tyler suffered a year of personal losses and challenges that she would never inflict on any of her characters. Modarressi died of lymphoma aged 65, and months later Tyler was diagnosed with breast cancer. While she was waiting for surgery her eldest daughter was operated on for a brain tumour. And yet there was still no break in the novels.

  Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
  While death and grief have always been present in her fiction, they are most directly addressed in The Beginner’s Goodbye, published in 2012. Usually, she says, she writes about “life stages”, rather than major life events.

  Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, came out in 1964, when she was 22. After the birth of her two daughters, Tezh and Mitra, she published a new novel every two or three years. If it were possible to round up and destroy her first four novels, she would: she used to believe editing destroyed a novel’s spontaneity – she now revises “endlessly”.

  It was a run of novels in the early 80s that really made her name, in particular Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, written when she was 40. The story of a dying matriarch and her three differently unhappy middle-aged offspring, the novel was written during “the difficult teenage years” of bringing up her own daughters. “I was escaping into a novel. I would sit there and then get lost in it,” she says now. “I don’t think it’s my best, but it was the one that was ripped from my heart to be put on the page. And you can’t say that about most books.” Her mother didn’t speak to her for a year and a half after it was published.

  She thinks A Spool of Blue Thread is her best. Another family saga looking back at how the parents went wrong, it was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Women’s prize in 2015. “It maybe had fewer mistakes in it than Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It was a more finished, well-constructed book,” she says. For all the acclaim of those earlier novels, she believes she is a better writer now, trusting both her characters and her readers more.

  A Spool of Blue Thread
  Like many of her characters, Tyler is a creature of habit. Each day begins with a walk before she sits at her desk with her pen and paper: “Sometimes it’s plodding, sometimes it flows.” Then follows a meticulous process of typing up the manuscript in tiny sections, rewriting it again, reading it aloud and recording it, so she can listen to it while looking at it on screen to check for any false notes or mistakes. “It’s so complicated, but it keeps me busy,” she says. If she gets stuck, she copies out the last two pages she wrote the day before, “and because it’s so slow to write things by hand, I’ll suddenly hit a word and say, ‘There’s where you went wrong. You just had that woman say something that she would never say.’ So I rewrite it, and suddenly I’m on track again.”

  She is “very pernickety” about her stationery and only ever used a Parker fountain pen, but had to wear plasters to stop her fingers getting covered in ink. One Christmas a Japanese reader sent her a beautifully wrapped box with every imaginable brand of pen in it, she says. “And one of them was very, very fine, black, and didn’t scrape on the paper at all.” She now orders them by the dozen online. Reader, it is a Uni-ball Signo. “I think that’s the only thing that’s changed since we last spoke,” she says, drolly.

  She is already at work on her next novel, which begins in the summer of last year. Tyler is famed for her Austen-like aversion to including references to external events. The Iraq war and Hillary Clinton are namechecked in The Beginner’s Goodbye, and the 2006 Digging to America gently addresses racial assimilation, but that’s about it.“I don’t approve of novels mentioning actual issues and going on and on about politics,” she says. “I’ve never had any urge to put politics in a novel or to even mention that it exists.” But recent events have been too momentous to ignore. “It seemed so wrong to have any character going about normal life after that horrendous election,” she says. “I am worried and anxious and depressed and everything you can be. This is such an extreme, horrifying thing to happen. I always trusted our constitution.”

  Tyler always prefers a happy ending, and if anyone can put a consoling spin on the US crisis it’s her. She would like never to finish this book, just to keep on revising and revising and not have to worry about the noise of publication, she says. But she has said that before and another five novels followed.

  She has “absolutely no fear” of death, rather of living too long. But it does annoy her that there might be unused index cards in the Blue Box. Maybe it stems from her horror of clutter.

  In the tradition of the best realist fiction, her novels make you want to do better, to be kinder – if that doesn’t sound too sugary. Does she feel a moral imperative as a novelist?

  “No,” she replies, emphatically. “It’s just that over and over again I am really struck by how ordinary people get through their day. Sometimes it almost strikes me as a sort of miracle. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. People don’t have a lot to hope for in average lives and yet they make do, and on the whole they behave, they behave very well. That is pretty amazing.”

  Three Days in June by Anne Tyler is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Tyler, Anne CLOCK DANCE Knopf (Adult Fiction) $26.95 7, 10 ISBN: 978-0-525-52122-8

After a lightweight foray into rewriting Shakespeare (Vinegar Girl, 2016, etc.), Tyler returns to her tried-and-true theme of family life's emotionally charged complexities.

Eleven-year-old Willa Drake doesn't really understand the fraught interchanges between her volatile mother and maddeningly mild-mannered father that roil the novel's opening chapter, set in Pennsylvania in 1967. But as the action leapfrogs to 1977 and she impulsively decides to marry college boyfriend Derek after he stands up to her mother on their first meeting, we see that, in a world of self-dramatizers and placaters, Willa has unconsciously decided to be a placater. The chapter detailing Derek's death in a California road-rage incident in 1997 suggests that Willa's placatory pattern is firmly set, an impression buttressed as Part II begins with 61-year-old Willa now married to Peter, another man who patronizes her and expects her to cater to his every whim. But then comes a phone call from Baltimore, where her son's ex-girlfriend Denise has been hospitalized with a broken leg after a mysterious shooting incident by a neighbor under the mistaken impression that Denise's daughter is Willa's granddaughter. This brazenly schematic setup for Willa's late-life regeneration is redeemed by the fact that it's utterly characteristic of our maddeningly mild-mannered heroine that she not only doesn't correct the misunderstanding, but gets on a plane to Baltimore, with Peter in tow complaining all the way. Power dynamics are never simple in Tyler's portraits of marriage, and when Willa needs to, she quietly gets what she wants. As she gets to know Denise's prematurely mature daughter, Cheryl, and the array of eccentric folks on their slightly seedy block--all vibrantly portrayed with Tyler's usual low-key gusto and bracingly dark humor--readers will want Willa to see that others appreciate her sly wit and tolerant acceptance of people's foibles as whiny Peter does not. But will she? Tyler drags out the suspense a tad longer than the slight plot merits.

More predictable and less profound than her most recent full-scale work (the magical A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015), but Tyler's characteristic warmth and affection for her characters are as engaging as ever.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Tyler, Anne: CLOCK DANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A536571238/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1485a4e3. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

CLOCK DANCE By Anne Tyler Knopf $26.95, 304 pages ISBN 9780525521228 Audio, eBook available

POPULAR FICTION

Deceptively simple prose is like a child with an adorable smile: They can both get away with a lot. In a career that began with 1964's If Morning Ever Comes, Anne Tyler has created one deceptively simple novel after another. Her specialty is the depiction of quiet lives that may seem ordinary at first glance. Upon closer inspection, each book is a subde analysis of American married life, its joys as well as its darker elements.

Tyler offers yet another astute portrait in Clock Dance. In 1967 Pennsylvania, 11 -year-old Willa is the elder daughter of a mild-mannered father and a mother prone to disappearances and bursts of violence. The action then shifts to 1977, when college junior Willa flies home so that her boyfriend, Derek, can meet her parents. After a section set in 1997, in which Derek, now her husband, dies in a car accident, the second half of the book shifts to 2017. Willa is living in Arizona and married to retired lawyer Peter. One day, she gets a call from a stranger in Baltimore, who tells her that Denise, a former girlfriend of her elder son, has been shot in the leg. The woman, Denise's neighbor, asks Willa to fly out to care for the victim's 9-year-old daughter, Cheryl, whom the neighbor mistakenly thinks is Willa's granddaughter.

Tyler fans won't be surprised to learn that kind-hearted Willa agrees to the request. Her experiences with Denise and Cheryl make up much of the book's drama. If the concluding pages are more circuitous than necessary, Tyler's touch is as light and sure as ever. Clock Dance is a tender portrait of everyday people dealing with loss and regret, the need to feel useful and the desire for independence.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
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Magras, Michael. "CLOCK DANCE." BookPage, July 2018, p. 19. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A544601880/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b346845e. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler

Chatto & Windus, 18.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 304

Willa Drake's second husband calls her 'little one', even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown boys. After a troubled childhood in Lark City, Pennsylvania, she married at 21, stopped studying after her first pregnancy and was widowed with teenage children when her first husband was killed in a road-rage incident of his own making. Willa walked away from the crash physically unscathed: 'She seemed to be in a kind of bubble, sealed away on her own.' Late in life she suddenly decides the time has come to stop drifting, or going 'at things so slantwise'. To her new husband's bafflement, she responds to a random call for help after one of her son's ex-girlfriends is shot in the leg in Baltimore. The ex-girlfriend, whom Willa has never met, has a young daughter who needs caring for while she is in hospital. Willa is not the girl's grandmother, but wishes she was.

Clock Dance is structured as a series of flashbacks to the defining episodes of Willa's life, which illuminate without explaining away her need to begin again. This is Anne Tyler's 22nd novel. Like many of its predecessors, it concerns marriage, children, the passage of time and minute details of domesticity. 'Any large "questions of life" that emerge in my novels are accidental,' Tyler has claimed, 'not a reason for writing the novel in the first place.' The accidental question that emerges in Clock Dance is: can a child of whom too much was expected too young recover in adult life?

Soon after Willa arrives in Baltimore to look after Cheryl, the daughter of her son's ex-girlfriend, she starts to reflect on her own childhood: 'she'd felt like a watchful, wary adult housed in a little girl's body'. Now in her sixties, paradoxically, 'it often seemed to her that from behind her adult face a child about eleven years old was still gazing out at the world'.

The novel begins in 1967, when Willa was 11, on the day that her flamboyant and volatile mother abandons her, her sister and their father. 'Grilled cheese sandwiches tonight,' Willa's father announces in a faux cheerful voice, 'your mother won't be joining us.' In her mother's absence Willa gets her younger sister and herself dressed and ready for the school bus, does household chores and emotionally supports their father: 'It wasn't so bad, really, being in charge. She began to imagine it as a permanent situation--just the three of them forever, coping on their own. Why, she and her father between them could keep things going just fine! They both liked systems, and methods. If her mother ever came back, she'd say, "Oh." She'd look around her and say, "Oh. I see you are doing better than I ever did."'

Willa's mother does come back, but never expresses the approval or gratitude that Willa hopes for. It is her parents' joint disapproval that propels her into such an early marriage. After she is widowed, Willa wonders if her boys will look back on their childhood with fondness, or whether they are storing up resentments against her. 'She had tried her best to be a good mother--which to her meant a predictable mother.' Her second husband's explanation for Willa's peculiar decision to fly across America to help the child of a stranger is simply that she misses being a mother: 'But look at it this way: now you've got me,' he says, desperate for attention.

'As far as I'm concerned, character is everything,' Tyler has said, 'I never did see why I have to throw in a plot too.' Clock Dance is a perfectly executed example of her fiction--precise, unpretentious and centred on credible characters to whom Tyler never condescends.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Scurr, Ruth. "Character actors." Spectator, vol. 337, no. 9908, 21 July 2018, p. 29. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549484942/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eef6c509. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

CLOCK DANCE By Anne Tyler 292 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

In 1986, Anne Tyler wrote an appreciation in this newspaper of one of her favorite childhood books, ''The Little House,'' by Virginia Lee Burton. The book was a gift, she wrote, one she received in 1945 on her fourth birthday and has kept ever since. It tells the story of a house, built in the countryside but eventually engulfed by a burgeoning city, then moved, years later, to a new place in the country. Although the story is simple, Tyler wrote, ''It seemed I'd been presented with a snapshot that showed me how the world worked: how the years flowed by and people altered and nothing could ever stay the same.''

This preoccupation with time -- how people weather both the cruelty and the comforts of passing years -- has long been a part of Tyler's work. Like the house in that children's book, her best characters have a way of revealing themselves through their steadfastness, even (or especially) during wrenching changes. For Willa Drake, first encountered as an 11-year-old doggedly keeping things together through her mother's various dramatic exits from the family, an early marriage offers a chance to build her own, more solid, home life. It also forces her to cut short her education as she raises two sons; after enduring unpredictability as a child, she has tried above all ''to be a good mother,'' Tyler writes, ''which to her meant a predictable mother.'' In doing so, we realize when we meet Willa at 61, married the second time round to a semiretired lawyer, that she has become sadly predictable, even to herself.

A stranger's phone call pulls Willa into a brand-new life. It turns out that the former girlfriend of one of Willa's sons has been injured and hospitalized, leaving no one to care for her young daughter. Scanning some numbers by the woman's phone, the stranger mistakes Willa for a grandmother of sorts. Lacking much of anything better to do, Willa decides to go for it.

A good portion of Tyler's 22nd novel, ''Clock Dance,'' takes place in Baltimore, the author's adopted hometown and one she's made use of in many previous novels, including 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning ''Breathing Lessons'' and 2015's ''A Spool of Blue Thread.'' Unlike in those books, whose characters mostly lived comfortably, here the setting itself is a little unsettled; Willa and her husband, Peter, arrive from their pristine Arizona retirement to a disheveled stretch of ''small, dingy white houses with squat front porches, some of them posted with signs for insurance agencies or podiatry offices.'' The block, it soon becomes clear, is kind and quirky but a little off-kilter: a Baltimore neighborhood that could be the offspring of Mr. Rogers and John Waters. Here, in one of those little houses, live Denise (the former girlfriend), Cheryl (her daughter) and Airplane (yet another of Tyler's very real and lovable fictional dogs).

[ Read Charles McGrath's profile of Anne Tyler ]

Like Dickens, Tyler sketches a well-peopled larger community, bustling with friends, lovers and bit players. But the book's real action centers on Willa and how, in lending Denise and especially Cheryl some of her steadiness and predictability, she reclaims something of her younger self: a bolder, messier person than the superficial one she'd become, the ''cheery and polite and genteel'' woman who ended up living near a golf course and wearing expensive clothes. The title comes from a game Willa watches Cheryl and two friends playing: the girls' arms all arms of a human clock, ticktocking through a summer afternoon. In the world of children, and of a newly chosen family, Willa finds herself altered -- or, perhaps, finds her unalterable self.

Despite her many accolades, Tyler is sometimes dismissed for her books' readability, for their deeply familiar pleasures. And she can occasionally spout a cliche (''Sometimes Willa felt she'd spent half her life apologizing for some man's behavior''). However, it's usually the kind of line that's a cliche because it's true. When I told a friend I was reading Anne Tyler, she said, ''Oh, my mother loves her books!'' In the world of serious literature, this is not a raving endorsement. But, just like Virginia Lee Burton's ''The Little House,'' the novels of Anne Tyler seem simple because she makes the very difficult look easier than it is. Her books are smarter and more interesting than they might appear on the surface; then again, so are our mothers.

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PHOTO: Anne Tyler (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW MANGUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Tuttle, Kate. "The Accidental Grandma." The New York Times Book Review, 5 Aug. 2018, p. 17(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A548924993/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=23fd2cc4. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Redhead by the Side of the Road

Anne Tyler. Knopf, $25.95 (192p) ISBN 978-0-525-65841-2

A fastidious everyman weathers a spate of relationship stresses in this compassionate, perceptive novel from Tyler (Clock Dance). Micah Mortimer, 43, makes house calls for his Tech Hermit business and moonlights as the superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, where the residents observe his regimented routine and wonder, through Tyler's gossip-inflected narration, "Does he ever stop to consider his life?" The disruptions begin with a call from his schoolteacher girlfriend, Cassia Slade, who is in a panic because she is facing eviction. Then college freshman Brink Adams shows up on his stoop and claims to be his son. Micah knows it isn't true, because he never slept with Brink's mother, Lorna, an old girlfriend, but he tolerates the languid, starry-eyed kid who claims to look up to him for living a working-class life and who fixated on a photo of Micah kept by Lorna. After Micah tries to put Brink in touch with Lorna, he disappears. When Cassia dumps him for not immediately offering to let her move in, Micah descends into a funk that just might push him to prove himself worthy of her companionship. While Micah's cool indifference occasionally feels like a symptom of Tyler's spare, detached style, his moments of growth bring satisfaction. This tale of a late bloomer goes down easy. Agent:Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary Management. (Apr.)

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"Redhead by the Side of the Road." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 2, 13 Jan. 2020, pp. 33+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A612368953/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2f8477f5. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Tyler, Anne REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD Knopf (Adult Fiction) $25.95 4, 7 ISBN: 978-0-525-65841-2

A man straitjacketed in routine blinks when his emotional blinders are removed in Tyler's characteristically tender and rueful latest (Clock Dance, 2018, etc.).

Micah's existence is entirely organized to his liking. Each morning he goes for a run at 7:15; starts his work as a freelance tech consultant around 10; and in the afternoons deals with tasks in the apartment building where he is the live-in super. He's the kind of person, brother-in-law Dave mockingly notes, who has an assigned chore for each day: "vacuuming day…dusting day….Your kitchen has a day all its own" (Thursday). Dave's comments are uttered at a hilarious, chaotic family get-together that demonstrates the origins of Micah's persnickety behavior and offers a welcome note of comedy in what is otherwise quite a sad tale. Micah thinks of himself as a good guy with a good life. It's something of a shock when the son of his college girlfriend turns up wondering if Micah might be his father (not possible, it's quickly established), and it's really a shock when his casual agreement to let 18-year-old Brink crash in his apartment for a night leads Micah's "woman friend," Cass, to break up with him. "There I was, on the verge of losing my apartment," she says. "What did you do? Quickly invite the nearest stranger into your spare room." Indignant at first, Micah slowly begins to see the pattern that has kept him warily distant from other people, particularly the girlfriends who were only briefly good enough for him. (They were always the ones who left, once they figured it out.) The title flags a lovely metaphor for Micah's lifelong ability to delude himself about the nature of his relationships. Once he realizes it, agonizing examples of the human connections he has unconsciously avoided are everywhere visible, his loneliness palpable. These chapters are painfully poignant--thank goodness Tyler is too warmhearted an artist not to give her sad-sack hero at least the possibility of a happy ending.

Suffused with feeling and very moving.

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"Tyler, Anne: REDHEAD BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A611140461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f5b1311f. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Redhead by the Side of the Road. By Anne Tyler. Apr. 2020.192p. Knopf, $25.95 (9780525658412).

If Tyler's large-cast, many-faceted novels, including Clock Dance (2018), are symphonies, this portrait of a man imprisoned by his routines is a concerto. Micah Mortimer emerged from a childhood in a large family and a chaotic household desperate for order and solitude. Now in his forties, he lives in an aggressively neat and clean basement apartment in the Baltimore apartment building in which he serves as super. He is also the Tech Hermit, responding to calls from people needing computer help. He keeps to a strict schedule, which includes some time for his lady friend, Cass, a fourth-grade teacher, but not enough to interfere with his need for privacy. And then, as so often is the case in Tyler's radiantly polished and emotionally intricate tales, someone unexpected and in need appears and disrupts the status quo. Micah's catalyst for panicked self-examination and change is a stranger, Brink, a college freshman inexplicably on the lam. Micah dated Brink's mother long ago, but he's had no contact with her since. What is going on? Tyler's perfectly modulated, instantly enmeshing, heartrending, funny, and redemptive tale sweetly dramatizes the absurdities of flawed perception and the risks of rigidity.--Donna Seaman

HIGH DEMAND BACKST0RY: Tyler's warmly comedic, quickly read tale, a perfect stress antidote, will delight her fans and provides an excellent "first" for readers new to this master of subtle and sublime brilliance.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "Redhead by the Side of the Road." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2020, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A614529397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=af671686. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Tyler, Anne FRENCH BRAID Knopf (Fiction None) $27.00 3, 22 ISBN: 978-0-593-32109-6

In her 24th novel, Tyler once again unravels the tangled threads of family life.

This familiar subject always seems fresh in her hands because Tyler draws her characters and their interactions in such specific and revealing detail. Robin and Mercy Garrett and their three children seem oddly distanced from each other when we meet them during a 1959 summer vacation. Robin talks a lot about what everything costs, and Mercy is frequently absent painting the local landscape. Fifteen-year-old Lily is also not around much; deprived of her Baltimore boyfriend, she's taken up with an older boy who bossy, judgmental older sister Alice is pleased to opine is only using her. Seven-year-old David rejects Robin's attempts to get him in the water in favor of inventing elaborate storylines for the plastic GIs he's recast as veterinarians. As usual, Tyler deftly sets the scene and broadly outlines characters who will change and deepen over time as the Garretts traverse 60 years; individual chapters offer the perspective of each parent and sibling (plus three members of the third generation). We need to get inside their heads, because the Garretts seldom discuss what's really on their minds, the primary example being the fact that once David goes to college, Mercy gets a studio and eventually stops living with Robin altogether. All the children know, but since she appears for family gatherings--including a weird but moving surprise 50th anniversary party Robin throws--no one ever mentions it. Tyler gives the final word to David, who, like his mother, has maintained tenuous family ties while deliberately keeping his distance. Families are like the French braids that left their daughter's hair in waves even after she undid them, he tells his wife: "You're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever." It's a characteristically homely, resonant metaphor from a writer who understands that the domestic world can contain the universe.

More lovely work from Tyler, still vital and creative at 80.

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"Tyler, Anne: FRENCH BRAID." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2022. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A688199720/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=76a22461. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

* French Braid. By Anne Tyler. Mar. 2022. 256p. Knopf, $27 (9780593321096).

In the Garrett family, each person is an island, mysterious and self-contained, yet, as Tyler reveals so deftly, all are inextricably connected. Her latest Baltimore-anchored, lushly imagined, psychologically intricate, virtually inhalable novel is a stepping-stone tale, with each finely composed section (after the opening scene) jumping forward in time, generation by generation. In 1959, Mercy is the wife of a stalwart plumber turned manager of her family's hardware store, the mother of temperamentally opposite teen daughters and a younger, dreamy son, and the story's heart and core enigma. All Mercy, who can be merciless, wants to do is paint in solitude, and her house portraits, which feature soft-focused interiors in which one object is rendered in hyper detail, parallel Tyler's zeroing in on characters at key moments. Bossy Alice is forever baffled by Lily, her more passionate sister. David, a high-school drama and English teacher, surprises everyone by marrying the seemingly austere school nurse. One granddaughter inherits Mercy's artistic talent; a grandson thinks no one knows he's gay; and Mercy's long-suffering husband is a font of unshakable love. In closing, the pandemic brings together a household of Garretts and their neighbors in new, rejuvenating ways. At every leap, Tyler balances gracefully between tenderness and piquant humor, her insights into human nature luminous. --Donna Seaman

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tyler is a phenomenon, each of her novels fresh and incisive, and this charming family tale will be honey for her fans.

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Seaman, Donna. "French Braid." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2022, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A692710642/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=42bc9b2f. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Anne Tyler's 24th novel, French Braid (Knopf, Mar.), opens with a scene set at Philadelphia's 30th Street train station in 2010. The first line describes how the old information board "clickety-clacked as the various gate assignments rolled up," noting that the board has since been replaced. It's an invitation to the past, and a sign that the novel will operate like many of Tyler's books, reaching through the decades with the feeling of time travel. Indeed, much of the book takes place in the 1950s and '60s.

"All my life, the thing I've wanted to do most in the world was be invited on a time machine," says Tyler, 80. She's speaking by phone from her home in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore, which is known for sprawling Victorians, porches, old trees, and public paths designed by Fredrick Law Olmstead that run through people's backyards. At one point, the battery runs down on her handset, and Tyler pauses to switch to another, a series of beeps triggering memories of landlines. Her voice is clear and crisp, and she answers questions with ease and candor, belying her reputation as one of those private, reclusive writers.

Like much of Tyler's work, French Braid is set in Baltimore. It follows a family through three generations, tracing its gradual and inexplicable dissolution.

It is happenstance, more than anything else, that keeps Tyler returning to the city in her fiction. She moved there with her late husband, Taghi Modarressi, in the 1960s. She didn't like it at first. She was a young mother in her early 20s with two books under her belt, and their surroundings felt "very old and sort of patrician," she says.

Originally from Minnesota, Tyler was struck by Baltimore's "class-oriented" culture. She wanted to go back to Montreal, where they'd lived for a spell because Modarressi, an Iranian doctor, ran out of time on his U.S. visa. At their new home, a neighbor across the street would sometimes get drunk and yell out the window, "Iranians go home." But then Tyler decided she'd try to be "philosophical" about it. She realized she was "kind of in a time -machine on this street, and I'd better just relax and enjoy it."

Tyler's fourth novel, The Clock Winder (1972), was her first Baltimore book. It follows a young woman named Elizabeth who works odd jobs around the house of a "very snooty old lady," as Tyler describes Mrs. Emerson. Tyler says Elizabeth is as appalled by Mrs. Emerson as Tyler herself was by some of her own neighbors from the period, adding that they're probably "all dead by now." She confesses that the main reason she writes so often about Baltimore is that it's "convenient." She needed a place, and Baltimore doesn't require research. "I don't feel very well rooted in my real life," she says, "and I have to remind myself to root my stories in some kind of geographical setting."

The novels often come from bits of overheard conversation on the street or in a grocery store, like Eddie's in Roland Park, where Tyler's fans hope to catch a glimpse of her. "The big dream is to see her there," says Marion Winik, an author and critic who lives in the neighborhood. In fact, fellow Baltimore writer Jessica Anya Blau wrote recently for LitHub about her triumph of standing behind Tyler in the Eddie's checkout line. But sightings are rare, Winik says, noting that Tyler and the filmmaker John Waters, who also lives in the area and throws a big Christmas party every year, are like the "yin and yang" of North Baltimore.

Tyler is quick to point out that, though she might be struck by things she overhears ("I'll, think, What was that about? And I sort of invent a story"), her novels aren't based on real life. "I'm always telling people, if you read it in my book, you can be sure it didn't happen."

Of course, some things have changed with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. "Since we've all become so isolated, I miss eavesdropping," Tyler says. But in six decades of writing books, her process hasn't changed. She still jots down her stray observations on index cards and writes her manuscripts in longhand. "I do feel it's almost like a craft. I always say, if I got arthritis, I would have to stop writing. It's just coming out through my fingers."

Tyler considers her fifth novel, Celestial Navigation (1974), about a painfully shy man who inherits a boarding house, her creative breakthrough. The previous books, which she wishes she could buy out and destroy, stemmed from her onetime belief in the value of writing spontaneously. Once she began doing more revisions, though, her work took on greater life.

"I didn't realize that the deeper you go, the more you live the life of another person," she says. "That's when I suddenly realized I want to write stories not because I want people to read them, but because I want to see what it's like to be such and such a person."

In rhe '80s, Tyler's novels were regularly finalists or winners of major prizes--judgments that only partly reflected her own assessments. "For many years, I would say that the book of my heart has always been in some ways Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant," she says, "because I felt like I was scraping my soul to write it, taking off layers of myself and putting them in the book." Published in 1982, it was a finalist for the Pulitzer. The Accidental Tourist, which followed in 1985, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and again made the list of Pulitzer finalists. Breathing Lessons won the Pulitzer in 1988. "All I could think was, Why that one?" she says. Her work has been recognized in recent years, as well, with A Spool of Thread (2015) selected as a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

In French Braid, a young woman named Serena Drew, while on her way back to Baltimore, thinks she recognizes her first cousin Nicholas in a train station in Philadelphia, but she can't be certain. Serena's doubt and lack of explanation for how her extended family came to feel so remote leads to the story of Serena's grandparents, who raised three children in the 1950s. The grandmother, Mercy, dutifully takes care of the house and children while dreaming of becoming an artist. After the last child leaves for college, Mercy spends most of her time in a rented studio, sleeping there for chunks of the week and making strange paintings of people's home interiors, each for a modest fee.

Mercy is a quintessential Tyler character. As Winik points out, Tyler's characters convey a "gentle quirkiness" specific to Baltimore, where people are "hapless, not driven achievers." In The Accidental Tourist, a man separates from his wife and moves in with his three adult siblings to the house where they grew up. One of the siblings' quirks is that they never answer the phone, a habit that passes without explanation.

Such unexplained quirks make readers wonder why a person might be a certain way. And in Tyler's world, even if the endings don't have big revelations, they offer great insight.

"Every family has things that are there, but they kind of pretend aren't," she says, describing the Drews in French Braid. "I mean, the fact that they can go through all those years where basically that couple is separated but not really, and everybody is behaving as if everything's normal..."

Characters, not stories, drive Tyler's fiction. "My gosh," she says, "nothing happens in any of my books if you get right down to it."

BY DAVID VARNO

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Varno, David. "Battimore state of mind: In her new novel, Anne Tyler examines the dissolution of a family in her home city." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 4, 24 Jan. 2022, pp. 25+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A691684831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fbd29ba2. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

French Braid

Anne Tyler. Knopf, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-0-593-32109-6

Tyler (Redhead by the Side of the Road) returns with a dry and well-crafted look at a family that inexplicably comes apart over several decades. Serena Drew, a 20-something Baltimore grad student traveling with her boyfriend, James, thinks she recognizes her cousin, Nicholas Garrett, in the crowd at a Philadelphia train station in 2010, but she can't say for sure because she hasn't seen him for years. "You guys give a whole new meaning to the phrase 'once removed,'" James says, and wonders if "some deep dark secret" might explain why Serena rarely sees her aunt Alice or her uncle David, Nicholas's father. But the explanation, as it happens, is not so simple. This also turns out not to be Serena's story, as Tyler leaves the young couple for late 1950s Baltimore, where Alice; Serena's mother, Lily; and David are raised by their mismatched parents, a socially awkward plumber named Robin and begrudging housewife Mercy, who wants to be an artist. Once the parents become empty nesters, Mercy spends most of her days and nights in her neighboring studio. There are no big reveals, but Tyler's focus on character development proves fruitful; a reunion organized by the wistful Robin in the '90s is particularly affecting, as is a coda with David during the Covid-19 pandemic. As always, Tyler offers borh comfort and surprise. (Mar.)

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"French Braid." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 3, 17 Jan. 2022, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A691684592/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da3fc881. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

FRENCH BRAIDBy Anne Tyler

In the opening pages of ''French Braid,'' a Baltimore college student spots a familiar-looking man in a train station. She suspects -- but isn't sure -- that he is her first cousin Nicholas. Her uncertainty shocks her traveling companion -- the boyfriend whose own close-knit family she has just met.

The roots of this familial distance are the central concern of ''French Braid,'' the 24th novel by the beloved Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler. Spanning 60 years and multiple generations, it offers a diffuse, affectionate portrait of the Garretts, a loving but aloof family in which nearly everything is left unsaid.

Our first glimpse of the Garrett clan comes in 1959, as the cousins' grandparents, Robin and Mercy, take a rare family vacation with their children. Tyler proceeds to check in on them once every decade or so, always at some moment of transition. What emerges is a kind of forensic examination of Garrett family relations, a look at how their elliptical style of interaction came to be.

Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is at heart a 20th-century realist, a younger contemporary of John Updike, Richard Yates and Alice Munro. Like them, she is interested in the tension between freedom and intimacy, personal fulfillment and the demands of family life. Mercy Garrett is a frustrated artist who, after a year and a half of art school in Baltimore, shelved her dream of studying in Paris, married decent, reliable Robin and raised three children. Only after her youngest leaves for college do her aspirations resurface. Mercy rents a painting studio a few blocks away and quietly ''leaves'' Robin by gradually moving her possessions there. It's a remarkable development, not least because it takes the rest of the family quite a while to catch on.

In fact, Mercy never admits that she and Robin have separated, not even to their children. Her new independence is too fragile. When her daughter confesses that her own marriage is on the rocks, Mercy panics: ''She was ashamed to admit that her main concern was how to dissuade Lily from moving into the studio.'' Mercy manages to dodge that bullet, only to get stuck taking care of her landlord's cat. When he asks her to keep the cat permanently, she can't bring herself to say no. She simply dumps it at an animal shelter when the landlord leaves town.

Mercy's furtiveness -- call it an extreme aversion to confrontation -- is echoed across the generations. When her son, David, suddenly marries a colleague at the school where he teaches, he tells his family after the fact. His sister Lily conceals her third marriage from her own children. Eddie, a Garrett grandson, never gets around to telling the family he is gay.

For Tyler fans, this is familiar territory: the quotidian frictions and rewards of family life in white, middle-class Baltimore. But while her earlier novels were heavy on domestic details, vividly evoking the texture of daily life, ''French Braid'' is less fully imagined, the characters less developed. There are simply too many years to cover, too many children and grandchildren to keep track of. The younger Garretts are drawn haphazardly, or not at all.

Five decades into her career, one gets the sense that Tyler is no longer quite so interested in the details. Instead, ''French Braid'' offers something subtler and finer, the long view on family: what remains years later, when the particulars have been sanded away by time. The tone is wistful, elegiac. Watching his own children grow into adulthood, David experiences an exquisite sense of loss: ''It was true that these days there happened to be two very dear grown-ups who were also named Emily and Nicholas, but they weren't the same people. It was just as if those children had died. He'd been in mourning ever since.''

The novel's emotional crescendo comes at Robin and Mercy's 50th-anniversary party. (Twenty years after she moved out, they still haven't told the kids.) Watching home movies with his disconnected, taciturn brood, Robin reflects: ''Had there been some kind of limit, in those days, on how long a scene could last? Each one was so brief. ... Pouf! And then goodbye. Goodbye to all of it. ... It had flown by way too fast, he thought as the screen went blank. And he didn't mean only the movie.''

''French Braid'' is a novel about what is remembered, what we're left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.

The novel ends on a poignant note, as David, now retired, finds himself unexpectedly awash in family intimacy when his son moves in with him during the pandemic. He is startled to recognize Garrett family traits in his 5-year-old grandson. ''David's father had raised his shoulders like that whenever he was intent on some task -- a man Benny had never laid eyes on.'' It leads him to recall the French braids his daughter wore as a child: ''When she undid them, her hair would still be in ripples.''

David tells his wife: ''That's how families work, too. You think you're free of them, but you're never really free; the ripples are crimped in forever.''

The moment is vintage Tyler: the epiphany that will surprise no one, a clever rephrasing of conventional wisdom that merely affirms what we already believe. It's why some (mostly male) critics have, over the years, dismissed her work as sentimental -- the defining characteristic of the genre known as ''women's fiction.'' It's a publishing euphemism that carries more than a whiff of misogyny, implying that fiction written by and about women is by definition something less than literature -- heartwarming rather than cerebral, reassuring rather than challenging. To be sure, over her long career Tyler has occasionally fallen into these traps. (See ''A Patchwork Planet.'') But ''French Braid'' is the opposite of reassuring. The novel is imbued with an old-school feminism of a kind currently unfashionable. It looks squarely at the consequences of stifled female ambition -- to the woman herself, and to those in her orbit.

For all its charm, ''French Braid'' is a quietly subversive novel, tackling fundamental assumptions about womanhood, motherhood and female aging. Contrary to the message of a thousand self-help books, Mercy's efforts to begin a career at midlife are fruitless. She advertises her services in neighborhood grocery stores, on laundromat bulletin boards: ''Let a Professional Artist Paint Your House's Portrait.'' After decades as a housewife, domestic life is her only subject.

In mourning the lost possibilities of Mercy's life, Tyler takes aim at a sentimental trope deeply embedded in American culture. The feminist movement notwithstanding, popular culture (not to mention ''women's fiction'') still clings to the notion of motherhood as the ultimate emotional fulfillment, the great and crowning satisfaction of a woman's life. For Mercy Garrett, that simply isn't the case.

Jennifer Haigh's sixth novel, ''Mercy Street,'' was published in February. FRENCH BRAID By Anne Tyler 256 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.

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PHOTO: Anne Tyler (PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANA WALKER) (BR20)

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Haigh, Jennifer. "Tangled Lives." The New York Times Book Review, 27 Mar. 2022, p. 1(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A698342617/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cfc20262. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Three Days in June

Anne Tyler. Knopf, $27 (176p) ISBN 978-0-593-80348-6

Bestseller Tyler (French Braid) returns with another appealing story of an idiosyncratic family. The day before her only daughter's wedding, 61-year-old Gail Baines learns she's been passed over for a promotion at the private girls' school where she works as assistant headmistress, and that she'll soon be replaced.

Maggie Su debuts with Blob, the story of a young woman who starts dating a shape-shifting blob (reviewed on this page).

That afternoon, her mild-mannered ex-husband, Max, shows up at her door with a cat he's fostering, having been turned away by their daughter, Debbie, because her fiance, Kenneth, is allergic to cats. Then Debbie tells Gail that Kenneth's unreliable sister, Elizabeth, has just claimed he had a recent fling with another woman. Debbie isn't sure if she believes Elizabeth, but Gail panics nonetheless. Still, the wedding proceeds as planned. The next day, Gail's flashbacks to her marriage with Max lead to a surprising revelation. As in Tyler's previous work, there's not much of a plot, but the pleasure is in learning how her characters tick, as Gail time and again fails to find the proper tact. By the end of the story, messy human relationships are proven to be worth all the trouble they cause. This will gratify Tyler's fans. Agent: Jesseca Salky, Salky Literary. (Feb.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Three Days in June." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 44, 18 Nov. 2024, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817760094/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=702774e1. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Three Days in June. By Anne Tyler. Feb. 2025. 176p. Knopf, $27 (9780593803486); e-book, $14.99 (9780593803493).

Tyler (French Braid, 2022) is exceptionally adept at exhilarating dialogue and the nuances of relationships. Like many of her other Baltimore-set novels, this delectable, tightly focused, and piquant comedy portrays a family whose alliances and conflicts are set to boil during the heat of a special occasion. It begins with a duel between the tightly wound protagonist, Gail, age 61, and her boss, who seems to be trying to edge Gail out, suggesting that she might long for a change. Gail thinks, "I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things." Now she's angry, as well as anxious about her daughter's wedding. Then Max, her ex-husband, arrives uninvited with a cat. As the wedding veers toward disaster, Gail wonders "how it was that anyone on earth found the courage to marry." During those fateful June days delicately laced with funny and poignant moments, hidden aspects of Gail and Max's unconventional natures, marriage, and divorce are revealed to profound effect. With every character, cat included, incisively and vividly realized, and myriad preoccupations and emotions limned with nimble wit and empathy, this is a keen delight.

HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Tyler's fan base is rock-solid, but as word gets out, all fiction lovers seeking a smart, sunny novel will ask for this one.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Seaman, Donna. "Three Days in June." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 7-8, Dec. 2024, p. 106. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829740180/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b96e766b. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Tyler, Anne THREE DAYS IN JUNE Knopf (Fiction None) $27.00 2, 11 ISBN: 9780593803486

Their daughter's wedding stirs up uncomfortable memories for a divorced couple.

The day before the ceremony, the bride's mother, Gail Baines, second in command at the Ashton School in Baltimore, learns that not only has she been passed over to replace the retiring headmistress, but the new recruit is bringing her deputy with her. The lack of people skills that have cost Gail this promotion are evident even in that initial scene; she's a classic cranky Tyler protagonist, given to blurting out her opinions with little consideration for others' feelings. Her first-person narration also reveals her to be touchingly vulnerable, convinced that daughter Debbie, prettier and more polished than she, will inevitably prefer husband-to-be Kenneth's overbearing, better-off parents. Although her divorce from Max was amicable, Gail considers him a bit of a slacker, and isn't best pleased when he turns up with a rescue cat in tow and says he has to stay with her because Kenneth is horribly allergic. A startling revelation from Debbie, fresh from her pre-wedding "Day of Beauty," immediately divides the exes, who have very different opinions about how their daughter should handle this crisis. It also leads to Gail's revelation of the infidelity that led to their divorce, though not in the way readers might imagine. Laid-back Max is the only fully fleshed character here other than Gail, and the novel is very short, but Tyler's touch is as delicate, her empathy for human beings and all their quirks as evident in her 25th work of fiction as it was in her first, published an astonishing 60 years ago. Gail's acerbic observations about the wedding and all its participants, her wistful memories of her odd-couple romance with Max, and her account of their enforced intimacy over the three days surrounding the wedding alternate to poignant effect. The closing pages offer a happy ending that feels true to the characters and utterly deserved.

Sweet, sharp, and satisfying.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Tyler, Anne: THREE DAYS IN JUNE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945883/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1622980b. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

Three Days in June

by Anne Tyler

Chatto & Windus, [pounds sterling]14.99, pp. 176

Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015).

In Three Days in June, Tyler's 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her. Instead, her boss suggests she finds another job, citing - to Gail's surprise - her lack of people skills. It is the day before Gail's daughter's wedding and, shortly after she returns home early, her ex-husband Max turns up unexpectedly, hoping to stay with her. He has not even brought a suit with him for the wedding, but he has brought a cat that needs rehousing. He is too laid-back for Gail's liking, but the two rub along amicably enough during the rehearsal and actual wedding of their only child, Debbie.

Tyler's work has been compared to Elizabeth Strout's, but it's hard to imagine Gail saying anything like 'She's so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke', as Strout's heroine Olive Kitteridge says to her son of his new wife. Tyler is often praised for her subtlety, but in this novel I feel she has taken it too far: the plot is quiet to the point of near stupor.

There is the occasional insubstantial poignant reflection: 'Anger feels so much better than sadness. Cleaner, somehow, and more definite. But then when the anger fades, the sadness comes right back again the same as ever.' Ultimately, the stakes do not feel high enough for it ever to seem worth engaging with the characters. Tyler is known for making the ordinary compelling; but I found it really hard to care whether Gail decides to keep the cat her ex-husband has brought with him or not.

The family relationships are well drawn, particularly between Gail and Debbie and Gail and her mother, who won't buy new clothes even though the old ones are too big for her, because 'she expected to die at any moment, although she was perfectly healthy'. Refreshingly, Gail feels awestruck by her daughter's beauty rather than envious; and she approaches her role as mother of the bride with an appealing lack of drama, even after a revelation threatens to jeopardise the wedding taking place at all.

There is some conflict between Max and Gail over how to support their daughter during this minor crisis, which leads the latter to reflect on why their marriage broke down. The novel's final paragraph provides a twist of sorts; but until that point I found the lavish endorsements from other authors, for this book in particular, difficult to fathom. I noticed, however, that both Jacqueline Wilson and Victoria Hislop mentioned reading it in a single afternoon, and perhaps that is the best way to approach Three Days in June - as a mild diversion for an afternoon.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Peake-Tomkinson, Alex. "Mother of the bride." Spectator, vol. 357, no. 10252, 22 Feb. 2025, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828526579/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e0ec283b. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

In Anne Tyler's new novel, a socially inept mother faces hurdles in her personal, professional and family lives.

THREE DAYS IN JUNE, by Anne Tyler

Hail, hail, Baltimore, the only city whose N.F.L. team is named after a poem. Baltimore has given us, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Billie Holiday, John Waters, ''Diner'' and ''The Wire.'' Let's not forget Anne Tyler, whose 25th novel, ''Three Days in June,'' drops next week.

This is not Tyler's best novel, nor is it her worst, though it's closer to the bottom than to the top. Like many of her later books, ''Three Days in June'' is a frugal series of plotlines -- regarding a wedding, a cat in need of a home, a late-life reconciliation -- that allow her to dip into familiar themes: family, fragility that intertwines with resilience, and finally, forgiveness.

Picking up ''Three Days in June,'' you recognize the well-worn lucidity and ease of Tyler's sometimes homely sentences. You recognize her avidity for the mundane, which can rival Stephen King's. ''Three Days in June'' is the sort of novel in which characters get pretty excited about microwaving a pair of potpies. The narrator comments, while being waited on by a teenager in a restaurant: ''Evidently all the 'hon'-type waitresses in their 60s had taken early retirement during the pandemic.''

This novel may be set after Covid, but it is almost entirely shorn of contemporary culture. Tyler's characters seem to live in a time warp -- in what Walter Winchell used to call the Oh-So-Long-Ago. You can imagine them watching Johnny Carson on late-night television, but not quite Jimmy Fallon. After all, the narrator owns a television that sticks out a foot and a half from the wall. The four walls of this novel can seem to be closing in.

That narrator is Gail Baines, who is having a hard couple of days. At 61, she's being pushed out of her job as the assistant headmistress at a private girl's school. Her daughter, Debbie, is getting married -- but the groom may have already cheated on her. What's more, Gail's semi-estranged ex-husband, Max, has come to town for the wedding and he's dragged along a cat that needs a home, one he hopes Gail will adopt.

Gail is tetchy. She lacks tact and diplomacy, she is often told. She refuses to butter up wealthy parents. She is told to stop saying things like, ''Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn't have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton.''

Gail is fickle and aloof; she lacks people skills. She wonders if she has ruined her life by worrying too much, by being too critical, by wanting everything to be too perfect. She is not the kind of woman who would hide a stone in a snowball, but you can imagine her reaching that point.

Along comes Max, back into her life. He's a messy, big-hearted schlub. They are going to get back together, or they are not. It's touch and go. And what about that cat? Raymond Chandler suspected his cat, Taki, was keeping a diary. If this (unnamed) cat were keeping one, there would not be a lot to report.

Those who have read Tyler for a long time will slide nostalgically into this novel. The headline on The Minnesota Star Tribune's review -- ''Need a Hug? Read the latest from the great Anne Tyler'' -- made me sharply ill, just for a moment. That may have been because I have the flu.

Tyler's best and best-known novels include ''Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant'' (1982), ''The Accidental Tourist'' (1985), which was made into a film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis, and ''Breathing Lessons'' (1988), which won a Pulitzer Prize. One of her more recent novels, ''A Spool of Blue Thread,'' was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2015.

In ''Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant,'' a character comments: ''It's closeness that does you in. Never get too close to people, son.'' It's the same reticence that Gail is trying to put behind her. She thinks things like ''Someday I'd like to get credit for not saying all the things I could have said'' and ''Sometimes when I find out what's on other people's minds I honestly wonder if we all live on the same planet.''

She wants only food that reminds her of the tastes of her childhood. I could imagine her saying what Bob Dylan does in ''The Philosophy of Modern Song,'' his recent book: ''Enjoy your free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction. Sometimes it's just better to have a BLT and be done with it.''

While I was reading ''Three Days in June,'' the pages did not turn themselves, but it is good enough that I did not resent my fingers for doing the job.

THREE DAYS IN JUNE | By Anne Tyler | Knopf | 176 pp. | $27

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PHOTO: Anne Tyler (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW MANGUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) This article appeared in print on page BR10.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Garner, Dwight. "Tetchy Times." The New York Times Book Review, 2 Mar. 2025, p. 10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A829282156/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29dce656. Accessed 28 Apr. 2025.

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