Anne Tyler’s 25th novel, Three Days in June, is characteristically Tyler in its focus; namely, middle-class family dynamics.Diana Walker/Supplied
Though her literary output – since it went into gear 61 years ago, in 1964, with a novel called If Morning Ever Comes – has barely waned, at 83, Anne Tyler remains best known for a string of novels published in the 1980s, including her breakout, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, made into a film starring William Hurt and Geena Davis, and Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
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Uncharacteristically slim (at 176 pages), her 25th novel, Three Days in June, is characteristically Tyler in its focus; namely, middle-class family dynamics – in this case sparked by the imminent Baltimore, Md., wedding of Debbie, the daughter of long-divorced couple Gail and Max. On the eve of the event, Gail is grappling with the sudden loss of her job as a schoolteacher and the unheralded arrival – non-hypoallergenic rescue cat in tow – on her doorstep of Max, who clearly hopes to stay with her. But the novel’s dramatic fuse is officially lit, and a portal into the family’s past opened, by Gail and Max’s oddly divergent reactions to Debbie’s distraught announcement, hours before she’s due at the altar, that her soon-to-be-husband may have recently cheated on her.
Few authors achieve as substantial body a work as you have. When you embarked on the writing life, did you know you would, or could, be so prolific?
I didn’t even know I was embarking on a writing life. The only reason I wrote my first novel was that I was trying to keep occupied while I was between jobs. Then I discovered what an addictive experience it is to lead imaginary lives, so that novel led to others.
Has your approach to writing evolved much since you started out in the sixties? What do you do differently, or the same?
In the beginning I had this weird idea that any sort of rewriting would make a novel an artificial construction, not sufficiently creative; so I just dashed my stories down on paper and sent them off as they emerged. Now I rewrite many, many times over, and I discover new depths to the story with each new version.
As you’ve moved through life, you’ve presumably experienced more of the family dynamics that have always been so central to your novels – and also come to inhabit roles (mother, grandmother, say) that you would have had to imagine as a younger writer. Are you aware of those experiences affecting the work?
I’m not consciously aware, but I do remember that in the days when my children were very small and I had no free writing time at all, I comforted myself with the notion that if and when I ever wrote again, the fact that I now had children would mean I was writing from a deeper self. And I do believe that is true.
What about the writing process gives you pleasure? Plagues you?
I love the moment when my characters take over, so to speak – when after I’ve begun by pushing them around like so many lifeless puppets, one of them will suddenly say something so unexpected that I know the story will be safely in their hands from that point on. And I hate those moments when I feel “stuck” – when for some unaccountable reason my characters balk and will not go on. Although usually I find that the reason is not unaccountable, after all. I’ve learned to flip back one or two pages and start copying every word all over again, slowly and – as always – in longhand, until suddenly one word will stop me short and I’ll realize that’s where I’ve gone wrong. It’s as if my subconscious had been trying to tell me something.
Anne Tyler novels don’t always have stereotypical “happy” endings, but they generally do offer a sense of resolution. What, for you, “resolves” a story?
I tend to end a novel at the point where I feel I’ve settled my characters into the place where they’ll stay settled forever, more or less. They’ve resolved a problem, they’ve discovered what it is they’ve been doing wrong – something along those lines. The surprise is that sometimes, I think I’ve been heading toward one ending and then my characters decide on another ending altogether.
Anything you’ve read recently that you can recommend?
I was very taken by Susan Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea, a novel about Palestinians making their new homes in Baltimore. And I loved Kathy Wang’s The Satisfaction Café, an upcoming novel about a Taiwanese woman’s life in California.
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