Back When We Were Grownups

By: Anne Tyler

Narrated by: Blair Brown

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." So Anne Tyler opens this irresistible new novel.

The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else’s?

On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation—something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family’s crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.

Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it—how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been—is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel.

As always with Anne Tyler’s novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also infinitely wiser.

Critic reviews

“You are involved before you even notice you were paying attention . . . Her feel for character is so keen that even hardened metafictionalists [who] would happily fry the whole notion of ‘character’ for breakfast are reduced to the role of helpless gossips, swapping avid hunches about the possible fates of the characters.”
–Tom Shone, The New Yorker

“Wise, kind, rueful and clear-eyed . . . and her truths are as gritty as earth and as interesting as the world.”
–Amy Bloom, Elle

“There’s not a flat line in this book . . . not a moment that isn’t tapped for all its glorious possibilities. This is storytelling at its best and most breathtaking.”
–Beth Kephart, Book magazine

“Tyler’s eye and ear for familial give and take is unerring, her humanity irresistible. You’ll want to turn back to the first chapter the moment you finish the last.”
–Linnea Lannon, People

Mid-life crisis

This is just a story about a woman having a mid-life crisis. Nothing dramatic ever happens as she works her way through it. Somehow it manages to be entertaining probably because of the colorful charaters.

Honest and hopeful

As always, Ann Tyler uses her characters to
teach the reader that there is beauty and joy to be found in even the most mundane and lopsided families. One just has to recognize it

Our true selves are never known

I very rarely ever re-listen to a fiction book. My only exception so far have been this book and another Anne Tyler book, "The Accidental Tourist".

Really good fiction makes one see beyond the plot and allows one to feel the meaning of a universal truth. Everyone needs to understand fiction for themselves, but I know why I like this book so much. The author understands how we get our purpose in life and that (at least for me) that the structure of the world is in place before we enter it and we have to accept that structure.

Our true selves are never known (that's a line form the book). We are thrown into the world and for us to make sense of our understanding about our own understanding we must accept our presence-at-hand and make sense of our worldliness (purpose) by realizing that our purpose comes about by understanding the whole by looking at the pieces we interact with.

Or perhaps I'm just reading something into the story the author never intended. Regardless, the book can be an entertaining listen.

Unusual story, great read

What did you love best about Back When We Were Grownups?

A non-traditional plot with a complicated family that Tyler somehow made interesting and diverse.

What about Blair Brown’s performance did you like?

Brown gets nuances in her acting and narration - she puts the irony where it belongs; stands back when she should.

If you could rename Back When We Were Grownups, what would you call it?

I don't know, but this wouldn't be the title.

Any additional comments?

Tyler is a master and this book so fresh and unusual - loved it.

Wonderful characters

As always, Anne Tyler delivers an interesting story with wonderful, quirky characters. She shows life as it is lived--full of self-doubt, unintentional side-trips and lots of ups and downs. You leave an Anne Tyler book, though, realizing that ordinary lives can be extraordinary if people live consciously. Don't read it for the plot (though that is great, too)--read it for the characters.