Product Description

One morning, Rebecca wakes up and realises she has turned into the wrong person. Is she really this joyous and outgoing organiser of parties, the put-upon heart of her dead husband's extended family? What happened to her quiet and serious nineteen-year-old self, and what would have happened if she'd married her college sweetheart? Can someone ever recover the person they've left behind?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83675 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The first sentence of Anne Tyler's 15th novel, Back When We Were Grown Ups, 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 the book. 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 centre 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 towards 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 former, 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 now 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, Amazon.com

From the Publisher
One of five Anne Tyler novels reissued in stunning new jackets

About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964 whilst her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In 1994, Tyler was nominated 'the greatest living novelist writing in English' by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Customer Reviews

Wonderfully Entertaining Slice of Life
Anne Tyler has an amazing, almost unique, ability to write about banal, everyday life whilst remaining hugely entertaining. This book is driven almost exclusively by the characters rather than the plot, yet is not stale or tedious for a second. The comings and goings of the extended family and their relationships with one another are a constant source of amusement, entertainment and concern in perfectly measured doses.

I read this whole book in one day as I couldn't bear to tear myself away from the inexplicably compelling story. I was left with a warm feeling of contentment. If I had to liken this book to a food, I would describe it as warm apple pie with brown sugar. Appealing, homely and comforting, yet naughty enough to keep you excited.

If you've never read Anne Tyler before, this is a perfect introduction.

it's excellent
Anne Tyler has the rare ability to map both the deepest and most fleeting cares of the human heart, without ever descending into mawkishness. She is incapable of writing a line that doesn't ring with emotional truth. This novel's protagonists are ageing with their author- the fulcrum around which the entire bickering cast revolves is Rebecca, a 53 year old widow, who has spent thirty years raising and supporting her dead husband's children, and mopping up after the 99 year old uncle living in the attic. Their casual acceptance of her role has finally led her to question whether she is, in fact, living the life she was destined to live which, she believes is one of bookish restraint, rather than the boisterous, party-throwing frenzy it has become. Her quest for the truth about herself brings her back to the boyfriend she rejected in high school, and forces her to wonder whether, as Uncle Poppy says, "your true life is the one you're living." I couldn't feel empathy with anyone who didn't respond to Anne Tyler's masterly writing, in this case,crafted with the art that conceals art, into an eminently readable, infinitely wise meditation on ageing, family, and self-awareness. All this, and funny too.

Like Rebecca's life, OK but not great
I hadn't read anything by Anne Tyler before. To be honest, I hadn't even heard of her and was really surprised to see, in the biog, that Nick Hornby had named her the 'greatest living novelist writing in English'. Having read "Back When We Were Grownups", appealing though it is, I have to say I'm still surprised !

The novel focuses on the relationships of the central character Rebecca, primarily those with her ex-husband's family. It takes place during a slice of time defined by her (seemingly sudden) need to question the person she has become and to rediscover the self that she could have been. (She feels that her 'lost real life' would have been altogether more serious, hence the title.) It is rather satisfying that she concludes that she has the greatest fulfilment in her 'fake real life', where the more obviously dramatic plotline would have been for her to tear it all up and start again.

Rebecca's relationships with the other characters can also be seen as a metaphor for family life (and relationships) in the western world (well, suburban Baltimore at least). Basically, the Davitch family, into which she married 30 years ago, is broken and is only held together by Rebecca, an 'outsider'. She starts by saving a boy from drowning and continues to perform minor heroics from there, receiving little or no recognition in the process. (The boy is her stepdaughter's dysfunctional stepson - see the 'broken' theme ?) For her part, she has only a functional relationship with her mother and finds greater satisfaction in her dealings with workmen and the host of strangers for whom she hosts parties. Ironically, her relationship with her only daughter is at least as wearisome as that with most of her family-by-marriage. Also, I may just have been watching too much East Enders, but is it significant that the women are generally mean-minded and the men self-absorbed ?

On the surface, the story seems quite homely, almost 'mumsey', in a way in which I would normally find very trying. Yet somehow, I found this difficult to put down. Tyler writes in a very easy style that stirs rather than shakes the emotions and which is very unpretentious and confident - where so many authors and their works are so self-important, that's actually very welcome !