Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but grew up in North Carolina. She graduated from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Before settling in Baltimore, where she has lived for much of her adult life, Tyler was a bibliographer at Duke University,and worked in the law library of McGill University. Tyler married in 1963; she and her husband have two daughters.
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Back When We Were Grownups
by Anne Tyler.
The first sentence of Anne Tyler's 15th novel sounds like something out of a fairy tale: "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." Alas, this discovery has less to do with magic than with a late-middle-age crisis, which is visited upon Rebecca Davitch in the opening pages of Back When We Were Grownups. At 53, this perpetually agreeable widow is "wide and soft and dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a center part."
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
by Anne Tyler.
Anne Tyler is known for her ability to explore and make real the ways in which "unexceptional" people create families out of what might be seen as a hopeless muddle of failed or failing relationships. The Tull family - frazzled and sometimes abusive mother Pearl, missing father Beck, jealous and manipulative son Cody, troubled but finally contented daughter Jenny, and loving, placid baby Ezra - resembles families most of us know. We first witness Pearl's memories as she wanders back through her life while lying on her deathbed; next, Cody takes over, and by the end of the book we have experienced each family member's perspective.
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Ladder of Years
by Anne Tyler.
Delia Grinstead, the baby of the family, has lived all her 40 years in the same rambling Baltimore house. She doted on her father, a doctor, then married his serious assistant when she was only 17. A petite, freckled, self-effacing woman, Delia was the perfect mother and wife until her kids reached young adulthood, her husband started to seem like an old man, and she realized that she had become nearly invisible. So she leaves.
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Saint Maybe
by Anne Tyler.
Tyler makes things look so easy that she never gets enough credit, yet she portrays everyday Americans with such humor, grace and, ultimately, emotional force that her books are always deeply satisfying. In Saint Maybe her protagonist Ian Bedloe, stricken with guilt over the death of his older brother, raises three children unrelated to him by blood. He is strengthened in this Herculean task by the storefront Church of the Second Chance, to which he devotes himself with equal fervor. Someone once said all great writers are comic writers. Among living Americans, Tyler is exhibit A.
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