Back When We Were Grownups

Rebecca, long widowed, is fifty-three years old. She lives in a big old Baltimore row house, grand on the outside and lovely when decorated for parties, if you don’t look too closely. Her husband died years ago, only six years after he married her and made her stepmother to his three daughters. Now she runs the family party business and cares for her elderly uncle-in-law. Everyone takes her for granted and she is very good at putting on a cheerful false front, whether mediating family squabbles or encouraging fellowship at parties or gatherings. She’s dependable, cheery, and hard-working. But she’s tired of being taken for granted. When she renews friendship with her old high school boyfriend, she has a chance to go back in time (in her mind) and reconsider where she has ended up. Is it good? Is she happy? Is the person she is now the real Rebecca, or has she been shaping herself this way for so long, to accommodate the needs of others, that she’s become merely a useful tool? Would there have been another version of herself that would have lived a “real” life, had Joe not come along and married her? Did he marry her to take care of his children and the family business?

Of course these questions resonate, and the answer, along with the way Rebecca processes this, is hugely gratifying.

I had to go back and reread it, because Anne Tyler is such a good writer and I’m always trying to improve my craft. She does tend to go on sometimes, and her characters are often kooky (remember “The Accidental Tourist” also by her.) But there’s a wry and benevolent view of humans in all of her writing, which is gratifying and reassuring. Very much recommended

I read several other reviews listed here. Perhaps you have to be 53 or older to understand Rebecca’s dilemma. Because I am her age, I totally got it. And I found her reunion with her almost-fiance to be a meaningful insight into her character. Tyler uses it to demonstrate how far Rebecca has come in her journey to self-hood, if there’s such a term. Her family, like most families, has its share of oddballs and outliers. The foibles of the lot make them real and believable characters. There is an arc to the story, but it is subtle. It takes a little work to identify just exactly when Rebecca begins to settle into herself, and that’s just fine with this reader. This story is deliberately told, skillfully interrogating the characters and how each has developed over his/her life. I was taken with Tyler’s description of Zeb, and his relationship with Rebecca. Similarly, Patch and Troy; NoNo, Biddy and Min Foo. In our family, each of us has a nickname, so Tyler’s use of them for her characters made them believable and accessible. Unlike most of Tyler’s fans — among which I now count myself — I came to Tyler’s writing recently and wish I’d discovered her years earlier.

I kept waiting for this book to go somewhere. I skipped a lot of it, trying to figure out if it was going to get better. It had very little narrative arc. The endless mundane dialogue was tedious. The names of the characters were contrived. It was as if the author was trying too hard to make too many of the names weird and unusual. I found it hard to feel drawn in by the main character. The set up is that she’s “discovered” she’s become someone other than who she intended to be. But she only dabbles lightly in trying to go back to a former self by meeting up with a past boyfriend. Nothing comes of that and any “epiphany” she might have is muted and lackluster. She ends up back in the same place she’s in at the beginning and the reader is left with no particular take-away. The book lacked forward momentum. It had a bogged down feeling the whole way through. Overall a pointless annoying book that I am sorry I wasted any time on.

This is my first Anne Tyler book and I was very disappointed. I kept waiting and waiting for a plot to develop but it never did. The characters were poorly defined. When I read a novel I like to get a mental picture of the characters but these characters just seemed like one big blob with nothing that made them stand out from the rest. I couldn’t come to care about any of them. I was so bored I couldn’t read this book for more than 15 minutes before I had to move on to something more interesting.

I first read ‘Back When We Were Grownups’ by Anne Tyler about ten years ago – and loved it. Since that time, I have been unerringly attracted to crime fiction. However, I recently executed a brief detour and bought three general fiction novels as well. ‘Back When we Were Grownups’ – in my opinion, Anne Tyler’s best work – is the only one of these that I have re-read, again and again.

It’s such a warm, generous and welcoming book just like the main character herself – Rebecca. Stepmother/mother to four girls and step-grandmother/grandmother to their offspring, Rebecca takes us through her days as a party-giver, whether celebrating with the clients who hire space in her home, The Open Arms, or as she coaxes and cajoles her family through engagements, weddings, picnics or the 100th birthday party of Poppy, her deceased husband’s Uncle, who she inherited along with the house.

Now in her early fifties, though widowed decades earlier, Rebecca wonders if maybe she lost herself and became somebody else along the way. She re-acquaints herself with Will Allenby, the man she was set to marry before she suddenly met and married Joe Davitch, founder of The Open Arms. Maybe if she’d married Will Allenby, they would have had a more academic life in ‘a comfortably shabby flat in some faculty widow’s house just off campus’ – her ‘real life’ is how she starts to think of this dream, as opposed to her ‘fake real life, with its tumult of of drop-in relatives and party guests and repairmen’. She finally learns how much each life means to her.

Rebecca is a wonderful character – sensitive, observant, cheerful, wistful, kind, funny – but maybe not the greatest dresser! Anne Tyler is a beautiful writer whose details of daily life and the thoughts and feelings they invoke are so accurately expressed, that the story becomes your ‘real life’, your escape, and very satisfying so, for just a little while.

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