Finding the reluctant writer

> Pulitzer-winner Anne Tyler talks about her work, her inspiration, and why she just keeps returning to the subject of human endurance

place part real, part imaginary – could not be less like the neighbourhood she actually lives in.

The Baltimore of Tyler’s novels is mostly middle class, or even working class – a place of crowded streets and small houses whose first stories sometimes double as offices for podiatrists and insurance agencies, and where people are probably a little kinder than they are elsewhere.

Clock Dance, Tyler’s fans will mostly be relieved to know, is hardly a departure.

It is almost a compendium of familiar Tyler tropes and situations.

It mostly takes place in Baltimore, though the main character is not from there.

There is a difficult mother and some estranged siblings, just as in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; a marriage of mutual (and perhaps deliberate) misunderstanding, as in Breathing Lessons; and, above all, a curious exploration of what it means to be part of a family.

Some of the characters watch a TV show called Space Junk, which is practically an emblem of the novel; it is about some aliens who kidnap random earthlings on the assumption that they must be related, and then try to figure out why they behave the way they do.

“Every time I begin a book I think this one is going to be completely different, and then it isn’t,” Tyler says.

“I would like to have something new and different, but have never had the ambition to completely change myself.

“If I try to think of some common thread, I really think I’m deeply interested in endurance.

“I don’t think living is easy, even for those of us who aren’t scrounging. It’s hard to get through every day and say there’s a good reason to get up tomorrow. It just amazes me that people do it, and so cheerfully.

“The clearest way that you can show endurance is by sticking with a family. It’s easy to dump a friend, but you can’t so easily dump a brother.

“How did they stick together, and what goes on when they do? – all those things just fascinate me.”

She has no plan to retire.

“What happens is six months go by after I finish a book,” she says, “and I start to go out of my mind. I have no hobbies, I don’t garden, I hate travel.

“The impetus is not inspiration, just a feeling that I better do this.

“There’s something addictive about leading another life at the same time you’re living your own.”

She pauses and adds: “If you think about it, it’s a very strange way to make a living.” – The

Independent