BALTIMORE (AP) ? In the living room of Anne Tyler, you could shelve virtually all the books under a single heading: fiction. For nearly 50 years Tyler has been making it up ? and telling the truth ? about love, family, work and death, while leaving current events for the nonfiction writers to handle. Many remember her for "The Accidental Tourist," adapted into the movie of the same name that featured Geena Davis in an Oscar-winning role as a quirky dog trainer who wins over an emotionally damaged travel adviser played by William Hurt. Among our better contemporary novelists," Katha Pollitt once wrote in The New York Times, "Tyler occupies a somewhat lonely place, polishing brighter and brighter a craft many novelists no longer deem essential to their purpose: the unfolding of character through brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail. [...] we'll have to assume she never swallowed a yellow marble thinking it was a lemon drop ("Searching for Caleb"), or faked her own death ("Morgan's Passing"), or carved a rock star's name on her forehead, not realizing that by doing so in a mirror she had filled in the letters backward ("A Slipping-Down Life"). [...] Tyler has not talked to the media in person for decades, sharing through written correspondence her thoughts with reporters, but not her ready smile or warm, slightly husky voice. Wearing dark slacks, a purple sweater and a white turtleneck, she sits comfortably on a couch looking out on the small yard in back of the attached brick house she has lived in for the past few years, since her two daughters grew up and her husband died after more than 30 years of marriage. Forced to move in with his overbearing sister, Nandina, he looks back on his marriage and remembers its bonds and strains and wonders "whether we find out what our lives have amounted to." The titles themselves ? The Beginner's Goodbye, ''Breathing Lessons, ''The Amateur Marriage, ''The Accidental Tourist ? suggest that life is a job assigned without warning, a body of water into which we're thrown, fully clothed. The people change, but a constant is Baltimore, her residence for 45 years and the setting for virtually all of her 19 novels, in which the street names have been changed but a real hardware store or grocery is likely to appear. The director notes that they present very different parts of the city ? you won't read about drag queens and serial killers in a Tyler novel ? but both have an affinity for outcasts and oddballs. "The preoccupations of certain stages of life ? child-rearing, adolescent-rearing, empty nest, aging, death of a spouse ? are clearly mirrored by the novels I wrote at the time I was going through those stages," she says. The compromises people make for another and the lifelong wounds and all that stuff is just fascinating to me. Born in Minneapolis and raised in rural North Carolina, Tyler is the daughter of Quakers and social activists who lived for years on communes.
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