Who is Anne Tyler?
I am a prolific reader, at least I used to think so. Not too long ago I joined a creative writing class on one of the online universities. Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist was on the reading list as was several others. Yesterday I was at work and one of the ladies I worked with asked “What does she write?”. My answer “Excuse me?” She had no clue who Anne Tyler was. She groups her reading into mystery, romance, and self help. Unfortunately Tyler fits into none of these. The best I could offer was “Life.” I find Tyler’s work to be so completely honest. I find myself shaking my head and thinking, “Yeh, I’d do that, or she would, or he would.” It is so completely realistic. Sometimes I need the outrageous, the I am never going to be like that life. A lot of time though I find myself enjoying the total fantastic way she brings our ordinary lives to such heights. We can’t all be Lara Croft or Martin Riggs. We can however be Beck or Matthew, or Zeb, or Jack. We probably are in fact. John write
Much has been made of her reclusive reputation. In his Harper’s essay, ‘Perchance to Dream’, Jonathan Franzen ranks her among those American writers for whom ‘reticence is integral to their artistic creed’. But while she is certainly private she is not fanatically so like Salinger, Pynchon or Harper Lee. She doesn’t do author tours, teach or lecture and has reputedly never even met her editor. (One desperate journalist is rumoured to have invented a sick baby in the hope that Tyler’s doctor husband might let her in.) Her author photo shows a smiling, attractive woman, whose heavy fringe and bun make her seem at once girlish and mumsy – not at all the hermit novelist. (Writer Lynne Truss uncharitably describes her as ‘witchy and a bit like Beryl Bainbridge’, which is unfair to both.) What we know about her life fits on to a book sleeve. Tyler has lived in Baltimore, Maryland, since 1967. But she was born, the eldest of four, in 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota; her father was a chemist a
