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Back When We Were Grownups, by Anne Tyler

Ebook Download Back When We Were Grownups, by Anne Tyler

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Amazon.com Review

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." Given her role as the matriarch of a large family--and the proprietress of a party-and-catering concern, the Open Arms--Rebecca is both personally and professionally inclined toward jollity. But at an engagement bash for one of her multiple stepdaughters, she finds herself questioning everything about her life: "How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who's not really me?" She spends the rest of the novel attempting to answer these questions--and trying to resurrect her older, extinguished self. Should she take up the research she began back in college on Robert E. Lee's motivation for joining the Confederacy? More to the point, should she take up with her college sweetheart, who's now divorced and living within easy striking range? None of these quick fixes pans out exactly as Rebecca imagines. What she emerges with is a kind of radiant resignation, best expressed by 100-year-old Poppy on his birthday: "There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be." A tautology, perhaps, but Tyler's delicate, densely populated novel makes it stick. Yes, Poppy. There are also characters named NoNo, Biddy, and Min Foo--the sort of saccharine roll call that might send many a reader scampering in the opposite direction. But Tyler knows exactly how to mingle the sweet with the sour, and in Back When We Were Grownups she manages this balancing act like the old pro she is. Even the familiar backdrop--shabby-genteel Baltimore, which resembles a virtual game preserve of Tylerian eccentrics--seems freshly observed. Can any human being really resist this novel? It is, to quote Rebecca, "a report on what it was like to be alive," and an appealingly accurate one to boot. --James Marcus

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From Publishers Weekly

On the first page of Tyler's stunning new novel, Rebecca Davitch, the heroine (and heroine is exactly the right word) realizes that she has become the "wrong person." No longer the "serene and dignified young woman" she was at 20, at 53 Rebecca finds she has become family caretaker and cheerleader, a woman with a "style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady." So she tries to do something about it. In the midst of her busy life as mother, grandmother and proprietor of the family business, the Open Arms (she hosts parties in the family's old Baltimore row house), Rebecca attempts to pick up the life she was leading before she married, back when she felt grownup. She visits her hometown in Virginia, locates the boyfriend she jilted and renews her intellectual interests. But as Rebecca ponders the life-that-might-have-been, the reader learns about the life-that-was. At 20, she left college and abandoned her high school sweetheart to marry a man who already had a large family to support. A year later, she had a baby of her own; five years later, her husband died in an auto accident, and she was left to raise four daughters, tend to her aging uncle-in-law and support them all. And a difficult lot they are, seldom crediting Rebecca for holding her rangy family together. Yet like all of Tyler's characters, they are charming in their dysfunction. And much as one feels for Rebecca, much as one wants her to find love, it's difficult to imagine her leaving or upsetting the family order. Tyler (The Accidental Tourist; Breathing Lessons) has a gift for creating endearing characters, but readers should find Rebecca particularly appealing, for despite the blows she takes, she bravely keeps on trying. Tyler also has a gift genius is more like it for unfurling intricate stories effortlessly, as if by whimsy or accident. The ease of her storytelling here is breathtaking, but almost unnoticeable because, rather like Rebecca, Tyler never calls attention to what she does. Late in the novel, Rebecca observes that her younger self had wanted to believe "that there were grander motivations in history than mere family and friends, mere domestic happenstance." Tyler makes it plain: nothing could be more grand. (May 8)Forecast: A 250,000 first printing seems almost modest considering the charms of Tyler's latest and the devotion of her readers. A Random House audiobook and a large-print edition will appear simultaneously, and the book is a BOMC main selection and an alternate selection of QPB, the Literary Guild, the Doubleday Book Club and Doubleday Large Print. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Hardcover: 273 pages

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (May 2001)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0375412530

ISBN-13: 978-0375412530

Product Dimensions:

6.6 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches

Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

3.6 out of 5 stars

290 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#487,381 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I read several other reviews listed here. Perhaps you have to be 53 or older to understand Rebecca's dilemma. Because I am her age, I totally got it. And I found her reunion with her almost-fiance to be a meaningful insight into her character. Tyler uses it to demonstrate how far Rebecca has come in her journey to self-hood, if there's such a term. Her family, like most families, has its share of oddballs and outliers. The foibles of the lot make them real and believable characters. There is an arc to the story, but it is subtle. It takes a little work to identify just exactly when Rebecca begins to settle into herself, and that's just fine with this reader. This story is deliberately told, skillfully interrogating the characters and how each has developed over his/her life. I was taken with Tyler's description of Zeb, and his relationship with Rebecca. Similarly, Patch and Troy; NoNo, Biddy and Min Foo. In our family, each of us has a nickname, so Tyler's use of them for her characters made them believable and accessible. Unlike most of Tyler's fans -- among which I now count myself -- I came to Tyler's writing recently and wish I'd discovered her years earlier.

I kept waiting for this book to go somewhere. I skipped a lot of it, trying to figure out if it was going to get better. It had very little narrative arc. The endless mundane dialogue was tedious. The names of the characters were contrived. It was as if the author was trying too hard to make too many of the names weird and unusual. I found it hard to feel drawn in by the main character. The set up is that she's "discovered" she's become someone other than who she intended to be. But she only dabbles lightly in trying to go back to a former self by meeting up with a past boyfriend. Nothing comes of that and any "epiphany" she might have is muted and lackluster. She ends up back in the same place she's in at the beginning and the reader is left with no particular take-away. The book lacked forward momentum. It had a bogged down feeling the whole way through. Overall a pointless annoying book that I am sorry I wasted any time on.

This is my first Anne Tyler book and I was very disappointed. I kept waiting and waiting for a plot to develop but it never did. The characters were poorly defined. When I read a novel I like to get a mental picture of the characters but these characters just seemed like one big blob with nothing that made them stand out from the rest. I couldn't come to care about any of them. I was so bored I couldn't read this book for more than 15 minutes before I had to move on to something more interesting.

I've bought this book in both hard copy and Kindle. One of my very favorite books ever. Simply love Rebecca...I think every woman who has ever been taken for granted as the under-appreciated family nurturer will see some of themselves in her story. Anne Tyler's language is just beautiful. I laugh each time I read about the poor boy grabbed by the floozy for a dance at the wedding, wearing "the shocked, frozen expression of a hijacking victim." This book thrilled me almost 10 years ago in hard copy, and the Kindle version was even better. Bravo!

I first read 'Back When We Were Grownups' by Anne Tyler about ten years ago - and loved it. Since that time, I have been unerringly attracted to crime fiction. However, I recently executed a brief detour and bought three general fiction novels as well. 'Back When we Were Grownups' - in my opinion, Anne Tyler's best work - is the only one of these that I have re-read, again and again.It's such a warm, generous and welcoming book just like the main character herself - Rebecca. Stepmother/mother to four girls and step-grandmother/grandmother to their offspring, Rebecca takes us through her days as a party-giver, whether celebrating with the clients who hire space in her home, The Open Arms, or as she coaxes and cajoles her family through engagements, weddings, picnics or the 100th birthday party of Poppy, her deceased husband's Uncle, who she inherited along with the house.Now in her early fifties, though widowed decades earlier, Rebecca wonders if maybe she lost herself and became somebody else along the way. She re-acquaints herself with Will Allenby, the man she was set to marry before she suddenly met and married Joe Davitch, founder of The Open Arms. Maybe if she'd married Will Allenby, they would have had a more academic life in 'a comfortably shabby flat in some faculty widow's house just off campus' - her 'real life' is how she starts to think of this dream, as opposed to her 'fake real life, with its tumult of of drop-in relatives and party guests and repairmen'. She finally learns how much each life means to her.Rebecca is a wonderful character - sensitive, observant, cheerful, wistful, kind, funny - but maybe not the greatest dresser! Anne Tyler is a beautiful writer whose details of daily life and the thoughts and feelings they invoke are so accurately expressed, that the story becomes your 'real life', your escape, and very satisfying so, for just a little while.

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