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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
The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else's?
On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation—something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family's crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.
Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it—how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been—is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.
As always with Anne Tyler's novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also infinitely wiser.
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Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition 0.66. Seller Inventory # bk0099422549xvz189zvxnew
Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. From the Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestseller Anne Tyler. Back When We Were Grown-ups is now re-jacketed along with the rest of Tyler's books in striking new backlist styleOne 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?**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson Can someone ever recover the person they've left behind?**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 1 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**'One of my favourite authors ' Liane Moriarty'She spins gold' Elizabeth Buchan 'Anne Tyler has no peer' Anita Shreve'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780099422549
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