Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler
Anne Tyleris a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, and Breathing Lessons. All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with Breathing Lessons winning the prize for 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 October 1941
CountryUnited States of America
You think we're a family,' Cody said, turning back. 'You think we're some jolly, situation-comedy family when we're in particles, torn apart, torn all over the place, and our mother was a witch.
People always talked about a mother's uncanny ability to read her children, but that was nothing compared to how children could read their mothers.
None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.
I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?
She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them
At most I'll spend three or four hours daily, sometimes less.
I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.
For me, writing something down was the only road out...I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. When I ran out of books I made up my own. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I made up stories in the dark.
The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.
There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.
Women were the ones that held the reins, it emerged.
Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs.
I expect that any day now, I will have said all I have to say; I'll have used up all my characters, and then I'll be free to get on with my real life.
I remember leaving the hospital - thinking, 'Wait, are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this.' We're just amateurs.