Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

“Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.”

This is the line that sets up the novel, and it’s a remarkably good opener for what is about to come. Middle-aged Rebecca Davitch one day finds herself looking at her family and at herself, and at the person she was before her marriage over thirty years ago, and begins to wonder about the life she might have had instead. What is most interesting to me about the premise is that she is not looking back on an unhappy life and wondering if it could be better—her life is as happy and full as any life could be. And yet she has been shaped and molded into a very different person than the person she began as, and she wonders if somehow she has become someone she is not.

For some reason, this premise spoke to me. I have noticed the tendency in myself and others to sometimes allow ourselves to become a different person in reaction to what we believe other people like about us or expect of us. And so at first I saw this book as sort of a thought experiment about what happens when you when, over time, you allow yourself to become someone who is no longer yourself. But the end reached a different conclusion, and it made me think—about how we shape our lives and selves, and how others shape our lives and selves.

I think what I like most about Anne Tyler is that her books are about the characters, and while Tyler can sometimes overwhelm me with their sheer personality, the characters still feel real to me. The reader gets to spend the book figuring out life and human relationships along with the main character. We spend time inside the characters’ heads, but not so deeply inside that we cannot see just a little more than they can.

Sometimes when you read several books by the same author, they all begin to sound the same, and that’s beginning to happen a bit for me with Anne Tyler. I picked up another a few weeks after finishing this one, and I’m struggling to get into it. Still, Back When We Were Grownups was probably my favorite of her books that I have read so far because more than other books I was able to see just a little bit of myself in the protagonist, and so the book really made me think about my own perceptions. I’m not sure it would speak to everyone in the same way (and in fact, it’s not her most highly-rated of her books on Amazon), but I really enjoyed the read.