{"id":22654,"date":"2014-01-26T13:01:24","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T18:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=22654"},"modified":"2015-08-17T10:35:26","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T14:35:26","slug":"back-when-we-were-grownups-by-anne-tyler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/back-when-we-were-grownups-by-anne-tyler\/","title":{"rendered":"Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Back<\/a>“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person,” Anne Tyler’s oldie-but-goodie begins, especially enhanced with the inimitable Blair Brown as welcome, familiar narrator. “How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who’s not really me?” the first chapter ends. At my age, that proves to be an irresistible opening!<\/p>\n[In an attempt to catch up with the backlogged to-be-added titles (how do I manage to fall so behind so regularly?), I’m going through some of Tyler’s bestselling 20 novels I’ve missed through the decades. While\u00a0Breathing Lessons<\/em> might be her most lauded (1989 Pulitzer), and\u00a0The Accidental Tourist<\/em> her best known (thanks to the Oscar-nominated William Hurt\/Geena Davis 1988 film), some of her not-quite-household-name books might be among her best.\u00a0Digging to America<\/em><\/a>, I admit, is my favorite thus far.\u00a0Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant<\/em>\u00a0stuck in the ears was a caricatured disaster as read by Arthur Morey; interestingly enough, it’s been re-recorded twice more by Kerry Shale in 2009 and Suzanne Toren in 2010 \u2013 hope they finally got it right! More recently, both\u00a0Noah’s Compass<\/em> and\u00a0The Amateur Marriage<\/i> felt rather\u00a0cranky and surprisingly dark. But, of course, I’ll keep reading.]\n

Oh, but I have digressed …\u00a0Back<\/em> to\u00a0Rebecca Davitch, who is constantly surrounded by people. She inherited her mix-and-not-so-matched family when she abandoned college at age 20 to marry her older divorced husband with three young daughters. When he died suddenly just six years later in a car accident, she had four children to raise and still others to care for, including her husband’s late father’s widowed twin brother who came to visit and never left. To support the family, Rebecca took over the family business\u00a0\u2013 opening the Open Arms, the family’s “ornate but crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house,” for parties: “All of Life’s Occasions from the Cradle to the Grave<\/em>, as their ad in the Yellow Pages put it.” Decades and decades later, she put on a welcoming face and took care of people \u2013 from relatives to relative strangers\u00a0\u2013\u00a0with barely a second thought. Until …\u00a0at the engagement party of one of her stepdaughters,\u00a0she realizes “she had turned into the wrong person”; at 53, she’s about to discover who she really is, and who she wants to be …<\/p>\n

The Talking Heads classic, “Once in a Lifetime<\/a>,” pops up regularly on my life’s soundtrack: Like Rebecca, I regularly question, “How did I get here?”?!! As Rebecca explores her past to see where she might have made the wrong choice, chosen the wrong way, taken the opposite path, she realizes (not without difficulties, not without heartbreak) that she is right where she needs to be, being the person she always was, the wife\/mother\/grandmother\/friend \u2013 the\u00a0real Rebecca \u2013\u00a0she was meant to be.<\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Adult<\/p>\n

Published<\/strong>: 2001<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person,” Anne Tyler’s oldie-but-goodie begins, especially enhanced with the inimitable Blair Brown as welcome, familiar narrator. “How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,81,6,60,6535],"tags":[976,1057,977,6608,75,10,13,129,44],"class_list":["post-22654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adult-readers","category-audio","category-fiction","category-nonethnic-specific","category-repost","tag-anne-tyler","tag-back-when-we-were-grownups","tag-blair-brown","tag-bookdragon","tag-death","tag-family","tag-love","tag-mother-daughter-relationship","tag-siblings"],"yoast_head":"\nBack When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler - BookDragon<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/back-when-we-were-grownups-by-anne-tyler\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler - BookDragon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person,” Anne Tyler’s oldie-but-goodie begins, especially enhanced with the inimitable Blair Brown as welcome, familiar narrator. “How on earth did I get like this? 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