For years, I’ve counted Anne Tyler as one of the three living authors who’ve most shaped my writing, alongside Toni Morrison, who at the time was still with us, and Amy Tan.
When I listed those women on my grad school application as my greatest writing influences, I decided that if the program didn’t find that acceptable, then it wasn’t the place for me.
I also only applied to one program because it was the only one I wanted to attend. Apparently, they shared my literary taste, and they must have liked my writing, because I graduated from the program. (Yay.) I really wouldn’t recommend that strategy to most people; you have to be willing to walk away, and I was.
Though there are dozens of authors I adore, those three women remain central to who I am as a reader and writer, in part because they kept me reading and growing after I’d left any kind of reading or writing community and before I returned to university and then went to grad school. For years, they kept me thinking, feeling, and writing.
I was delighted, and honestly, surprised, recently to see our reclusive Anne Tyler giving interviews. For decades, she was famous for avoiding publicity, and while I don’t know what has brought her back, I’ve been thrilled to see her emerge. I’ve learned more about her in just a few interviews these past months than I ever knew before.
Now, at 83, she’s giving us a peek not only into her life at long last but also at her famous Blue Box of scribbled observations. She goes to it when she wants to write a book. Spoiler: it’s no longer blue; she outgrew her original recipe box. It’s now a black-and-white cardboard box labeled “Blue Box,” stuffed with index cards where she jots single words or snippets of conversation for future use.
Word Raccoon WANTS IT! But I’m sure she’d have to wait in a very long line to get it.
I adore so many of Tyler’s novels. They’re all quiet, with a magnifying glass on details others miss in ordinary life. She has an eye and ear for characters who are everyday people no one else has thought to write about, and she makes them special, important, when most would just ignore these people. I love her for that.
(A certain someone in my life says I collect “characters.” I think I do have a high threshold for unique people, but actually, introvert though I am, I think I just like people. Most days.)
The first book I read of Tyler’s was a random library grab. I picked up Ladder of Years from our local library to take with me on a trip to Ohio during a week away with my husband and our daughter. As my daughter swam, radiant and tireless, and my husband attended classes, I sat poolside wrestling with my own sense of motherhood. We were newly a family, and as Delia Grinstead drifted away from hers in the novel, I…felt things. How could I find my way when everything felt so uncharted?
When we returned home, I read all the Tyler novels the library owned. Then I saw the list of books she’d written inside one of her paperbacks, and I felt cheated because the library didn’t have them all. (I don’t know if I didn’t know about interlibrary loan yet or if I thought that was only for scholarly books. At any rate, I didn’t use it.)
This book-finding mission of mine was before Amazon or eBay. Instead, I searched secondhand bookstores and flea markets, finding her novels one by one until I had them all.
I’ll never forget grabbing hold of A Slipping-Down Life in its red paperback cover. It had been one of the more elusive titles, since it was first published in 1970. I remember scanning, scanning, titles among the overheated scent of yellowing paperbacks crowding the flea market tables, until my search was finally rewarded.
I think I paid two dollars and told the seller to keep the change — I would have paid ten times that. Since I wasn’t driving, I began reading it on the way home.
In A Slipping-Down Life, Evie Decker, a lonely teenager, carves the name of a musician into her forehead—a desperate act of longing to be seen, paralleling Delia from Ladder of Years in certain ways. Reading Evie’s story as a young adult reminded me that the search for identity starts early and never really goes away.
Revisiting both novels now, I see a conversation spanning the whole arc of my adult life. Delia and Evie are women I carry with me, reminders that identity is slippery, that reinvention is both frightening and necessary, and that it’s possible to come back to the surface even when you fear you’re drowning. Maybe especially when you think you’re drowning in what you see as your most important roles.
If Ladder of Years and A Slipping-Down Life helped me wrestle with identity, The Accidental Tourist may be Anne Tyler’s novel that most impacted me. I’ve read it at different points in my life, and each time it has offered a new mirror—one that reflects not just who I am, but how I move through love, grief, and the rituals of everyday survival.
In Tourist, Macon Leary is a man, a travel writer for those who want to travel but encounter as few changes to their daily routine as possible. His grief for his murdered son has frozen him into rigid routines that he then wants to perpetuate on other travelers. Sigh.
His life is almost stagnant until Muriel Pritchett, fierce and chaotic, blusters into his world with her dog-walking service. She teaches Macon that life doesn’t wait for you to be ready; sometimes it grabs you by the collar and makes you come along. Tyler shows, with her signature wit and compassion, that healing is messy, nonlinear, and often arrives disguised as inconvenience or even annoyance.
A pause: the rain has begun, and a breeze and its scent are coming in off the pavement and sidewalk, petrichor and ozone. Every muscle unkinks when I smell that. How fitting that it should happen when I’m writing about St. Anne on the sunporch. I really should consider closing the windows, but not yet. I’m not ready to let go of that marvelous scent.
Word Raccoon is reminding me that we haven’t finished this post yet and that until we do, she will not eat supper and she’s ready, ready, ready. What would I do without this little dear to help me? (She also says to tell you that she received notice her Coke Zero earrings are now in the process of being made! She will show pics when she has them!)
Okay, apparently supper awaits. We write on.
Not just singly, but collectively, Tyler’s beautiful, quiet prose lives together for me in a dense mesh of what it is to be alive, like the roots of a tree. I’m not always sure I can trace each novel back to its original story; it’s more the comprehensive impression they’ve left on me along with lines and characters.
Her latest novel, Three Days in June, is one of her shortest, yet no less compelling, novels. I read it mostly in one sitting, the best way to read if you can.
At 83, she’s still exploring the joys and heartbreaks of love, marriage, and family life with the same deep sensitivity she’s always brought to her work. Her protagonist in June, Gail, is so churlish you almost don’t want to root for her, yet somehow, you do.
Or maybe you find yourself voting for her ex, Max, a bumbling yet loving man.
I can’t remember every physical place I’ve read Tyler, but one stands out: I brought Clock Dance to Japan, and it was such a nice distraction because it was days before I slept more than a couple of hours. First of all, jetlag, but also, the beds were like baby crib mattresses, thin and full of springs. They were awful! At least I had Anne Tyler’s newest to keep me company. (I know that story is incredibly “first world problems,” but I swear, I could not wait to get home.)
There’s such fairness in Tyler’s writing gaze. She isn’t judging. She doesn’t tell you that this person is good and that one bad. There are no villains in her stories, just differing points of view. I love that, because isn’t that mostly the truth when it comes to life?
So many novels of hers to love, every one of them. But most of all, I want to offer Anne Tyler a thank you for her Blue Box, her quiet gaze, her unwavering faith in the beauty of everyday people. I’m grateful beyond words to have walked alongside her stories all these years.
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