Back when we were grownups
By Anne Tyler

- Reviewed by Jennifer West

Anne Tyler's latest novel, Back When We Were Grownups, begins: "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."  This woman is none other than 53-year-old Rebecca "Beck" Davitch, mother, widow, owner and manager of the "Open Arms," and caregiver to a sprawling extended family of eccentric relatives with names like NoNo, Biddy, Min Foo, Patch and the demanding Uncle-in-law Poppy.

During an engagement party for one of her step-daughters, Rebecca looks back over her life and asks herself: "How on earth did I get like this? How? How did I ever become this person who's not really me?" Rebecca wonders what happened to the serene and dignified 20-year-old she was once, happy to be researching Robert E. Lee's motivation for joining the Confederacy, and engaged to marry her studious college sweetheart Will Allenby.  But then Rebecca had decided to instead marry the older, divorced Joe Davitch, help raise his three daughters, and take over the family business of hosting parties for customers in the family's old Baltimore row house. Was the decision a mistake? What happened to her "true" life? Rebecca visits her hometown in Virginia and gets in touch with the now-divorced Allenby, thinking perhaps it is not too late to change her circumstances - but is that really what she wants? Rebecca's interior journey through her past leads her back to her present life where she learns, as Poppy observes on his 100th birthday: "There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be."

Anne Tyler was born in Minnesota, the daughter of an industrial chemist and a social worker. The family lived among various Quaker communities in the rural south before settling in Raleigh, N.C.
She made her debut with If Morning Ever Comes in 1964, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for Breathing Lessons. One of America's favorite novelists, Tyler's stories, often set in Baltimore, focus on middle-class families and their secrets, ambitions, dreams and crises. Back When We Were Grownups is her 15th book.
 

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