“I’m ashamed,” Anne Tyler says of the publication of her new novel, Three Days in June, a typically Tyleresque off‑kilter romantic comedy about a long-divorced, mismatched couple. “I didn’t even realise I was up to 25. If you look at a writer’s work and you see that many titles you think, ‘Well, it can’t be very serious work.’ But that’s what happened.”
The seriousness of Tyler’s fiction, which includes much-loved novels Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer prize-winning Breathing Lessons, has bothered critics for decades. How could a writer of such witty, warm, kind novels about middle-class families that contain very little historical context, no politics or sex, even, really be one of America’s finest living novelists, as so many have claimed? Not to mention her prodigiousness. The author herself couldn’t give two hoots. Unswayed by literary fashion or criticism, she has been writing the novels that interest her, and her devoted readership, for 60 years. “How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,” she says.
Now 83, Tyler is on a video call from her Quaker retirement community just outside Baltimore. It is where her parents retired, and by chance, she moved into the house next door a couple of years ago. (She grew up in a Quaker commune in the mountains of North Carolina but describes herself as “a secular Quaker”.) She is framed by a large window that looks out on to trees, white walls and high eaves. “I like to say there are more deer here than people,” she jokes of her rural surroundings. “And I don’t feel any older living here than I did before.” For many years she lived in the Roland Park neighbourhood of Baltimore, where, as Tyler fans will know, most of those 25 novels are set.
It is 10am there, and she has just seen off her old college roommate, who stayed over the night before. Neat as a pin in a slim grey polo-neck, she looks the same as when we last met 13 years ago, except that her trademark silver fringe is now white. Then, it was a sunny afternoon in Kensington, west London, and her first face-to-face interview in 40 years. Her reluctance to do publicity meant she was often referred to as a JD Salinger-like recluse and on one occasion “the Greta Garbo of the literary world”. Yet it is hard to imagine anyone less prickly than Tyler, who talks with the softest southern accent and smiles with her whole face. She isn’t as “allergic” to interviews as she used to be (and even agreed to Desert Island Discs a couple of years ago), but she still finds them a bit of a pain: “If I talk about writing, I can’t do any writing for some time afterward. I’m too self-conscious,” she explains. “I think I’m shy, to be honest. I hate to admit it as a grownup, but there we are.”
She is so unassuming, some of her friends don’t even know she is a writer. When she downsized, she didn’t keep a copy of any of her own books. “What would I do with them?” She has them all on a Kindle, but only so she can check if she’s repeating herself. Both her daughters are artists, and now she has so little wall space, it is reserved only for their work. She even got rid of most of her kitchen utensils. “There’s no clutter in my house!” she declares, proudly.
One possession that was never in danger of being culled was Tyler’s index card box of ideas: sometimes the outline for whole stories, but mostly just a few words, snatches of conversation. “I’ll write down a single word and use it 40 years later,” she explains. It started out as a royal-blue recipe tin, and when that became overstuffed she upgraded to a bigger, black‑and-white index box and wrote “Blue Box” on the label (a detail that might have come from one of her novels). Before beginning a new book, she takes a dozen or so cards and sees if any of them spark something. It was to the Blue Box she turned for Three Days in June.
At only 176 pages, the novel is set in Baltimore (naturally) over the three days of the wedding of Debbie Baines, but deftly expands to tell the story of her parents’ failed marriage. Gail Baines is 61 years old and has recently been let go from her job as assistant headteacher because she “lacks people skills”. She likes ironing, cuts her own hair and still has an answering machine because there are too many people she might not feel like talking to. Her ex-husband, Max, is scruffy, unpredictable, “a good man”, the author says affectionately, one of Tyler’s endearingly hapless male characters. “Boundaries; that was his problem. He lacked boundaries. I myself was all about boundaries,” Gail observes. (She might be friends with Elizabeth Strout’s more outspoken Olive Kitteridge up in Maine, although they’d be sure to get on each other’s nerves.) The day before their daughter’s wedding, Max turns up on her doorstep with a stray cat.
The idea on the index card was along the lines of the famous Sex and the City quote “find someone to love the you you love”, and it is one that she has used before, she admits unapologetically. “There are certain people who bring out the best in us and the worst,” she says. “And it’s wise to marry somebody who brings out the best.”
The general theme of her cards is “‘What would it be like to be that person over there?’” she says. “Everything I write is about trying to lead a life other than my own.” But when she looks back on all her work, she is puzzled that she stayed so close to home. “Why didn’t I write about somebody who went off to climb Everest?” she asks herself. “I don’t know, but that doesn’t interest me so much.”
As she says, all her novels are domestic, which has led to accusations of sentimentality and blandness. One review called her books “milk and cookies” in contrast to “the astonishing display of piss and vinegar” in Philip Roth. The comparison rings true, Tyler said back in 2012. But there’s clearly some old-fashioned sexism at work: when Updike (one of Tyler’s earliest champions) writes about married life he is “giving the mundane its beautiful due”, as he put it. Yet, arguably, Tyler’s work has endured better than some of those Big American Males, whose novels now leave a slightly bitter taste. “I used to just devour every word of Roth and Updike, and still think very highly of them,” she says. “But as you mentioned their names, I had a slight sense of … Oh, those were the smart alec guys, you know.”
At its best, Tyler’s work is bittersweet rather than saccharine: when she writes about families, she is writing about how they stay together, “how they grate along”. “I wondered why it was that I had so many irritating people in my life,” Gail muses in the new novel. Tyler’s true subject is endurance, “the most moving quality of human beings”, she says.
She attributes her many sympathetic male characters to having been “unusually lucky” in being surrounded by decent men growing up: an “amazing father” and three younger brothers (later she would add a “wonderful husband” to the list). Her mother, a social worker, was “difficult”, given to mood swings and unpredictable rages; one of her brothers would check round her bedroom door in the morning to see what sort of day it might be (Tyler now thinks she might have been bi-polar). But she was determined her children would love books. Tyler often credits her early years on the commune with giving her a novelist’s outsider slant on the world.
When she was 11, the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Tyler attended a proper school for the first time. She won a scholarship to Duke University at 16, where she majored in Russian (the most rebellious thing she could do at the time) and attended creative writing classes taught by the poet and writer Reynolds Price. He immediately recognised her talent and inadvertently influenced some of her most celebrated novels by proclaiming that men can write about women, but women can’t write about men: “I thought, well, I’ll show you, Reynolds!” After a year at Columbia, New York, she returned to Duke to work as a Russian bibliographer in the library, where she met her husband Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian refugee and child psychiatrist, 10 years her senior.
They were married for 34 years until, in 1997, Tyler suffered a year of personal losses and challenges that she would never inflict on any of her characters. Modarressi died of lymphoma aged 65, and months later Tyler was diagnosed with breast cancer. While she was waiting for surgery her eldest daughter was operated on for a brain tumour. And yet there was still no break in the novels.
While death and grief have always been present in her fiction, they are most directly addressed in The Beginner’s Goodbye, published in 2012. Usually, she says, she writes about “life stages”, rather than major life events.
Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, came out in 1964, when she was 22. After the birth of her two daughters, Tezh and Mitra, she published a new novel every two or three years. If it were possible to round up and destroy her first four novels, she would: she used to believe editing destroyed a novel’s spontaneity – she now revises “endlessly”.
It was a run of novels in the early 80s that really made her name, in particular Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, written when she was 40. The story of a dying matriarch and her three differently unhappy middle-aged offspring, the novel was written during “the difficult teenage years” of bringing up her own daughters. “I was escaping into a novel. I would sit there and then get lost in it,” she says now. “I don’t think it’s my best, but it was the one that was ripped from my heart to be put on the page. And you can’t say that about most books.” Her mother didn’t speak to her for a year and a half after it was published.
She thinks A Spool of Blue Thread is her best. Another family saga looking back at how the parents went wrong, it was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Women’s prize in 2015. “It maybe had fewer mistakes in it than Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It was a more finished, well-constructed book,” she says. For all the acclaim of those earlier novels, she believes she is a better writer now, trusting both her characters and her readers more.
Like many of her characters, Tyler is a creature of habit. Each day begins with a walk before she sits at her desk with her pen and paper: “Sometimes it’s plodding, sometimes it flows.” Then follows a meticulous process of typing up the manuscript in tiny sections, rewriting it again, reading it aloud and recording it, so she can listen to it while looking at it on screen to check for any false notes or mistakes. “It’s so complicated, but it keeps me busy,” she says. If she gets stuck, she copies out the last two pages she wrote the day before, “and because it’s so slow to write things by hand, I’ll suddenly hit a word and say, ‘There’s where you went wrong. You just had that woman say something that she would never say.’ So I rewrite it, and suddenly I’m on track again.”
She is “very pernickety” about her stationery and only ever used a Parker fountain pen, but had to wear plasters to stop her fingers getting covered in ink. One Christmas a Japanese reader sent her a beautifully wrapped box with every imaginable brand of pen in it, she says. “And one of them was very, very fine, black, and didn’t scrape on the paper at all.” She now orders them by the dozen online. Reader, it is a Uni-ball Signo. “I think that’s the only thing that’s changed since we last spoke,” she says, drolly.
She is already at work on her next novel, which begins in the summer of last year. Tyler is famed for her Austen-like aversion to including references to external events. The Iraq war and Hillary Clinton are namechecked in The Beginner’s Goodbye, and the 2006 Digging to America gently addresses racial assimilation, but that’s about it.“I don’t approve of novels mentioning actual issues and going on and on about politics,” she says. “I’ve never had any urge to put politics in a novel or to even mention that it exists.” But recent events have been too momentous to ignore. “It seemed so wrong to have any character going about normal life after that horrendous election,” she says. “I am worried and anxious and depressed and everything you can be. This is such an extreme, horrifying thing to happen. I always trusted our constitution.”
Tyler always prefers a happy ending, and if anyone can put a consoling spin on the US crisis it’s her. She would like never to finish this book, just to keep on revising and revising and not have to worry about the noise of publication, she says. But she has said that before and another five novels followed.
She has “absolutely no fear” of death, rather of living too long. But it does annoy her that there might be unused index cards in the Blue Box. Maybe it stems from her horror of clutter.
In the tradition of the best realist fiction, her novels make you want to do better, to be kinder – if that doesn’t sound too sugary. Does she feel a moral imperative as a novelist?
“No,” she replies, emphatically. “It’s just that over and over again I am really struck by how ordinary people get through their day. Sometimes it almost strikes me as a sort of miracle. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. People don’t have a lot to hope for in average lives and yet they make do, and on the whole they behave, they behave very well. That is pretty amazing.”
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
