Back When We Were Grownups
by Anne Tyler
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345446860
Publisher: Ballantine
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler’s fifteenth novel;
her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore.
top of the page
Q: What was the genesis of this novel? Did a particular character or situation come to mind first?
AT: I plotted Back When We Were Grownups just after emerging from a year in which there had been several losses and serious illnesses in my family. I wanted my next novel to be full of joy and celebration, which is how I ended up with a main character who earned her living throwing parties.
That a sense of loss shows through anyway, at a later point in the book, is proof that the subconscious always tends to triumph in the end.
Q: Why did you choose this title for the novel? Were there others that you discarded along the way?
AT: It's one of my few organic, natural-born titles; it was always there, on its own
Q: Has Rebecca really become the wrong person?
AT: Well, of course she's become a different person. But not the wrong one, as it turns out.
Q: Why is it so difficult for Rebecca to see that she chose Joe and the Davitches just as they chose her?
AT: Rebecca is no more astute--or less--than most of us about her reasons for doing things. If people were fully conscious of their motives, novelists wouldn't have anything to write novels about.
Q: Would you agree that Rebecca is unaware, on some important level, that she has become the center of the Davitch family?
AT: Yes. She's a very modest and unassuming woman; it wouldn't occur to her that she could be so important to other people.
Q: Has Rebecca finally come to terms with the family and the life she ended up with? Will she ever stop feeling like an outsider, like a not-a-Davitch?
AT: The point at which I decide a novel is finished is the point where I say, "My character has arrived, and I can picture him or her more or less settled there forever." So yes, by the end of the book she has come to terms with her life. (She's still not-a-Davitch, but that's immaterial.)
Q: Did Rebecca ever have a chance to truly mourn Joe, given the incredible responsibilities that were thrust upon her with his death?
AT: Even with all those responsibilities, she did mourn--but I think of it as a kind of stupor of mourning, unlike the more reflective kind of grief that she experiences toward the end of the novel.
Q: Poppy refuses to hide his grief over his dead wife, which perturbs many of the Davitches. Is his behavior, like the constant reciting of Aunt Joyce's funeral poem, troubled or simply honest?
AT: I certainly didn't mean to imply he was troubled. This is his particular response to loss--the opposite, or maybe the underside, of Rebecca's response to her own loss.
Q: Rebecca thinks she would have stayed with Will if Joe had not swept her off her feet. Was this a likely scenario?
AT: That's the kind of question I trust readers to know the answer to once they've read the novel.
Q: "Their [Rebecca and Will's] past was a bolt of fabric they had scissored up and divided between them." What do they gain from their exchange of memories?
AT: It's more a question of what the reader gains: a sense, I hope, of how fractured and subjective our interpretation of our past is.
Q: Could the Davitches--all of them--have helped Will open up to the world? Or is it too late for him?
AT: Some people really are not capable of change. I think Will is one of them. Any effort the Davitches might have made would probably have just overwhelmed him.
Q: Rebecca's treatment of Will--rejecting him for a second time after inviting him into her life--could be considered cruel. Do you agree?
AT: It was painful, yes. ("Cruel" implies too much of an intent to give pain.) I felt downright guilty when I wrote that scene. But for Rebecca to have stayed with him would have been even more painful. Sometimes, you just have to make that choice.
Q: We know how Zeb feels, but it is unclear how Rebecca feels about him. Might something romantic ever happen between the two of them?
AT: Someday, Zeb and Rebecca are going to marry. The Davitches will be taken aback at first, but they'll warm to the idea wholeheartedly as soon as they've adjusted.
Q: Rebecca reflects that "there were no perfect parties." Why are people, like so many of the Davitches, often unwilling to recognize how much hard work celebrations are?
AT: It wasn't the hard work of celebrations that I had in mind; it was the fact that there is no perfect event, period--that every human interaction is necessarily a mixed and mingled affair.
Q: Rebecca's disapproving mother continues to exert a powerful influence over her as does Rebecca over her daughters. Is it possible to ever stop being your parent's child or your child's parent?
AT: Yes, on occasion. But for a novelist the people who don't stop are much more interesting.
Q: Do you ever find yourself getting angry at or having trouble writing for thorny and difficult characters like Patch and Rebecca's mother?
AT: In real life I might be very annoyed by some of my characters. I find it a great deal easier to be tolerant of them on paper.
Q: Once you have created a fictional universe, is it hard to turn it over to the rest of the world? Do you feel protective of your characters?
AT: I always have a spell of maternal anxiety when a manuscript is finally on its way to New York (where, for the first time, someone other than me will see it). I picture my characters riding the train, independent of me at last, excited and shy and unsure of themselves. But once they've arrived and been accepted, I tend to forget about them.
Q: If you had to choose a favorite character in this novel, besides Rebecca, which would it be and why?
AT: I'm very fond of Peter. I like his curiosity and is active mind; I think he's going to grow up to be a very interesting young man.
Q: What other books would you suggest for a reading group discussion?
AT: The most rewarding choice for reading groups would be a book that they could argue about passionately among themselves. Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children,for instance--people have always loved that book or hated it. It could make for a wonderfully lively discussion.
Q: Are you working a new novel?
AT: I'm in the early stages of a novel about an unhappy marriage-- a subject that intrigues me because it provides such a good opportunity to watch different types of characters grating against each other. It begins in 1941, and I'm finding it an unexpected pleasure to live in another time for a while.
Excerpted from Back When We Were Grownups © Copyright 2008 by Anne Tyler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
