BALTIMORE — About five years ago, relatives began vanishing from the Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler’s life like disappearing ink. They faded away so gradually and quietly Tyler hadn’t even realized they were gone, leaving behind only faint traces of long-ago relationships.
A friend compiling a genealogical chart told Tyler she had discovered that two aunts had passed away: the author’s mother’s sister, Marjorie, and Rose Ann, who had been married to Tyler’s uncle. The aunts were elderly, but the way the author learned the news left her feeling bewildered and shaken.
“I had always liked them, but they lived farther away,” said Tyler, who is 80. “There hadn’t been any rift. The idea that we could lose touch like that was such a shock.
“I thought, ‘How could a family just drift apart?’”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has been puzzling over that question ever since.
An answer of sorts can be found in her 25th novel, “French Braid." Set partly in the Cedarcroft and Hampden neighborhoods, the novel follows three generations of the Garrett family from a family vacation in 1959 through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Though Tyler has lived in Baltimore for 55 years, this was the first face-to-face interview she has granted The Baltimore Sun. For nearly four decades, she refused to sit down with any reporter — a policy that perhaps undeservedly earned her a reputation as being reclusive.
Tyler might be introverted, but she isn’t shy and doesn’t lack self-confidence. But she said discussing her writing process hampers her ability to construct imaginative worlds. Interviews don’t merely delay the writing process for Tyler; they set it back.
“Whenever I talk about writing, I start noticing the whole process and it stops working for me,” Tyler said. She’s making an exception now, she said, because “I’m not actively involved in writing a novel these days.”
But once she agreed to chat, she didn’t hold back. The wide-ranging discussion touched upon Tyler’s creative process, why her novels don’t deal with Baltimore’s racial divide, and hard lessons learned from the pandemic.
A talent ‘for small things’
The woman answering the door is tall, slender and fine-boned and wears her long gray-white hair piled behind her head. Long bangs provide a protective thicket for her eyes, which emit a ray of curiosity so focused it’s tempting to imagine they could illuminate a street corner at night.
Many critics regard Tyler as one of America’s finest living novelists. Fans cite her National Book Critics Circle Award in 1985, a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1989, and the 1988 movie made from Tyler’s ninth novel, “The Accidental Tourist,” which was filmed mostly in Baltimore and starred William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Geena Davis.
More recently, Tyler has been nominated twice for England’s Booker Prize, arguably the English-speaking world’s second most prestigious literary award after the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Booker, now in its 54th year, wasn’t open to American authors until 2014. Tyler came close twice, as a finalist in 2015 for “A Spool of Blue Thread” and as a semifinalist in 2018 for “Redhead by the Side of the Road.”
Admirers praise her expertise at dissecting the tensions of family life in exquisite, excruciating detail. Like a dentist with gentle hands, she probes beneath the surface, excavating areas of decay with such a deft touch that the people reclining in the big chairs aren’t fully aware they’ve just been through an ordeal.
The author knows that despite its many pleasures, reading is hard work. She makes it painless as possible by filling her novels with clear, simple sentences even when tackling life’s big challenges.
“If a book I’m reading is very obscure or experimental,” she said, “I always think: ‘Talk to me. I’m sitting right here.’ ”
Despite the praise Tyler’s novels have received, she’s acutely aware of their limitations.
In 2019, the author Jess Row called out Tyler publicly in his book, “White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination” for neglecting to address Baltimore’s racial divide in her fiction. His criticisms of Tyler were summarized in a New York Times book review.
Row described Tyler as “a writer (like many other white writers of her generation and era) who typifies what I call a posture of racial silence: not talking about race, and likely, for the most part, wishing that conversations about race didn’t have to happen. ... Baltimore has such an extreme, obvious, seemingly unavoidable history of racial discrimination and violence, and yet, from reading her novels, one would never know it.”
Tyler acknowledges her novels don’t discuss race — or world hunger, climate change and the war in Ukraine. Sweeping, issues-oriented novels are not her milieu.
“I’m never going to write a great novel, something towering,” she said. “I cannot write about race or war and peace. I get very impatient with myself, but that is not what pulls me. My talent is for small things. This little domestic space is what is mine.”
It’s not that the author doesn’t care about people living in the Sandtown-Winchester or Middle East neighborhoods. But Tyler doesn’t think she has the right ears to do them justice.
“There have been Black characters in my books, but none that I’ve viewed from within,” she said. “For me personally, presuming to write from inside the mind of a Black person would be disrespectful.”
Living from the outside
Despite Tyler’s desire for privacy, over the decades, the outlines of her life story — she’s now a grandmother of two — have emerged.
She was born in Minneapolis in 1941. As a child, her family lived in a series of Quaker communes, finally settling in the North Carolina mountains. Young Anne attended public school for the first time at age 11, and believes the culture shock instilled in her a lifelong feeling of being an outsider.
“I had never used a telephone and could strike a match on the soles of my bare feet,” she wrote in her 1980 essay, “Still Just Writing.”
“All the children in the new school looked very peculiar to me,” she said, “and I certainly must have looked peculiar to them.”
Tyler met her future husband, the Iranian psychiatrist Taghi Modarressi while she was a student at Duke University. In 1967, the couple moved to Baltimore and settled in the Homeland neighborhood.
Even as Tyler raised two daughters, she made time to write, though not without struggle.
Every few years, a new novel was published. Critics praised them, and prestigious awards piled up. In 1989, a reporter for The Sun knocked on Tyler’s door and told her she had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for “Breathing Lessons.”
“I’m in the middle of writing a sentence, so I can’t be interrupted,” Tyler said as she shut the door, “but I’m very pleased.”
That pattern of productivity continued even during a period in the late 1990s when the novelist was hammered with personal tragedies: her husband’s premature death from lymphoma, Tyler’s diagnosis of breast cancer and subsequent double mastectomy, and a daughter’s brain surgery to remove a benign tumor.
Both women recovered fully, and Tyler continued publishing novels: “A Patchwork Planet” in 1998 and “Back When We Were Grownups” in 2001.
“I can’t just sit home all day’
So two decades later, when the pandemic descended on Maryland, Tyler expected to sail through it. Accustomed to spending long stretches of time alone, she was certain enforced isolation would not be a problem for her.
Except that it was.
Tyler found herself so distracted she was unable to read deeply. Even worse — for the first time in her life, the author has been unable to start another novel though she’s been trying for more than a year.
“Nothing worked this time,” she said.
“Certainly, I have been distracted all through the pandemic. What I don’t understand is why. I’m honestly not afraid of COVID. So what is it that I’m so worried about?
“I don’t know.”
Tyler might not be working on another novel, but that doesn’t mean she’s stopped putting pen to paper. Not writing is not an option for her.
If Tyler couldn’t write, she wouldn’t fully grasp how food tastes. Sounds wouldn’t be as sharp or colors as vibrant. She wouldn’t truly know what she thought. Not writing would be a sentence to a more vague, more approximate life.
So instead of a novel, the author is writing short stories “just for the drawer,” though she insists they’re not for publication.
“I can’t just sit home all day,” she said.
“I get in and out of my characters’ lives for three weeks, and then I’m done. I’m not going to send these stories to my agent.
“But, it has kept me going.”
Tyler hopes her writer’s block will ease as life returns to normal following the pandemic.
She wonders if COVID-19 didn’t dry up her sources for inspiration when it abruptly halted the superficial encounters of daily life: jury duty, weekly movie nights, taking a walk without crossing the street to avoid approaching pedestrians.
“I never write from real life,” she said, “but I love to eavesdrop as I’m waiting in line at the grocery store.”
For decades, Tyler jotted down overheard remarks on index cards which she keeps in a file. A card from 1965 might later inspire characters, scenes, an entire novel.
“A lot of things during the pandemic have surprised me,” Tyler said. “I didn’t realize how much I relied on random brushes with humanity. Half of the things on my index cards are what those two people were arguing about. All of a sudden I was deprived of that.
“COVID-19 has taught me that I want a little bit more human connection than I thought.”
