Anne Tyler’s search for normality

is the least showy of writers, says Louise France in The Times. She is one of America’s best-loved novelists and her books sell in their millions. But for decades, the 76-year-old refused every interview request, and her home is a modest house in a retirement community in suburban Baltimore where she moved 11 years after her husband died. Many of her friends don’t even know what she does. “It’s not a big deal, you know? I mean, writers don’t walk down the street and get people asking them for autographs. It’s not something that affects my daily life.” It is, she says, a normal life – which is what she always wanted. As a child in the late 1940s, she moved with her parents to a Quaker commune in a remote valley in North Carolina. The idea was that everyone would live off the land and share their resources. “There was one eccentric man who lived in a hole in the ground, but he’d nicely fitted it out,” she says. Her mother home-educated her children, and made all their clothes and even their shoes – but she was no earth mother: she was a volatile, scarily unpredictable woman given to furious rages. A watchful child, Tyler retreated into her imagination. When she left the commune, she vowed never to be different again. “If you’d asked me what I wanted to do, I’d have said get married and have children,” she says. “I never planned to be a writer. And, when you think about it, it is a very odd way to make a living. Just telling lies.”