Tyler’s neurotic fear

Novelist Anne Tyler might be one of the world’s most acclaimed novelists, said Hadley Freeman in TheGuardian.com, but she’s never outgrown her childhood fear that if she simply thought about something it might come true. When she was a child, she used to wish that her school would burn down on the eve of a math test, but would then fret about it, because “I would have felt so guilty.” When she wrote the murder scene of a 12-year-old, Ethan Leary, in her 1995 novel The Accidental Tourist, she rendered him younger than her daughters, “so I wouldn’t think as they came up to that age, ‘Oh no, what have I set in motion?’” Tyler, who lives in Baltimore, often channels childhood emotions into her characters, who are famously bewildered by how the “normal” world works. She attributes this to growing up in Quaker communities. At age 11, on her first day of mainstream school, some girls treated as a her a curiosity and she thought, “‘Oh, I’m in another world here.’ It was very tough to figure out.” Even today, at 78, she worries that her secret wish that her book tour would be canceled somehow conjured up the coronavirus pandemic: “So now I’m thinking, ‘Oh dear, be careful what you wish for!’”

Steves’ surprising contentment

Rick Steves is not used to being stuck at home, said Gabriella Paiella in GQ.com. As host of Rick Steves’ Europe and a worldclass travel guru, he’s constantly on the move. But now he’s sheltering in place in his house in Washington state. “It’s a big adjustment for me to get away from my addiction to being productive every day,” he says. “I’m a joyful workaholic, because I love my work and I have a mission.” But to his surprise, he hasn’t hated being home. “There’s a sort of an intimacy that you wouldn’t have otherwise,” he says, “and the big question for a lot of us is, ‘Will anything good come out of this when we’re done?” In Steves’ case, the answer is yes. He’s learning to cook and play the piano. He’s taking strolls with his girlfriend and her two dogs, keeping up with loved ones on Zoom, and paying attention to his immediate environment on Puget Sound instead of running off to Tuscany, Paris, or the Alps. “I’ve enjoyed the sunset every time it’s clear when the sun goes down,” he says. “It’s a performance. You might not be so mindful of that otherwise.” The experience even has the 64-yearold thinking about permanently getting off the road. “The only thing I’m missing,” he says, “is the freedom to get together with friends, but I can picture myself retired and being very, very happy, which is different than I would have fundamentally thought.”