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.

On it's way to a new OBCZ in Colchester. Happy travelling!

Kindly donated to GoodiesShopOBCZ by PatchworkPerson - thank you!

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On the OBCZ shelf in the back Conservatory - through the Secret Passage :-)

I picked this up ages ago from the Coggeshall OBCZ, with the intention of taking it, along with a batch of other books, to the Ipswich OBCZ – to get things moving a bit.

Started reading it as I’d been hearing a lot about Anne Tyler. And sorry, that was ages and ages ago!! Just finished it…

Not really sure what I made of it. At the start we were introduced to a lot of characters all at once, which was a bit confusing, but soon got the hang of the extended Davitch family. It was certainly a suitable bedtime book – pretty steady (‘plodding’ would be unkind) with nothing overly racey going on. Since Rebecca didn’t seem to know what she wanted then the outcome seemed predictable, I guess. (Think she should have looked at Zeb more closely though!)

I liked the style well enough, with some good amusing bits here and there, so I would read another Tyler to see if it was just this story which didn’t grab me.

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