In Charm City, up close and personal with Anne Tyler
On Baltimore, books and ghost stories
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist opens up about her life and her work habits, and she even reveals a little game she plays.
BALTIMORE — How perfect that novelist Anne Tyler lives in the only American city with an NFL team named for a poem: Edgar Allan Poe’s
The Raven.
Along with Poe, the Ravens, Old Bay Seasoning and Cal Ripken Jr., Tyler belongs to Baltimore, that quirky, struggling, charming old metropolis perched on the Chesapeake and made famous — or perhaps infamous — by HBO’S celebrated urban crime series The Wire.
Tyler, who has lived in Baltimore since 1967, has set almost all of her 19 novels in Charm City. Yet, she says, “when I answer questions about Baltimore, I feel like an impostor.” Somewhere, she suspects, “the grandmothers are whispering, ‘She doesn’t know a thing about Baltimore!’ ”
But Tyler confides that she has a little game she plays. She fantasizes that the characters from her novels “have formed a small town in Baltimore where they pass each other in the street.”
Tylertown residents would include Tyler’s favorite, the stoic, good-hearted Ezra from Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and Macon Leary, the reluctant travel writer from The Accidental Tourist. William Hurt played Macon in the hit 1988 movie; Geena Davis co-starred as the eccentric Muriel, who trained his dog and melted his frozen heart.
In this age of relentless self-promotion, Tyler herself qualifies as eccentric. Despite multiple best sellers and a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Breathing Lessons, she has not granted a face-to-face interview with a reporter in 35 years.
Seated in her immaculate Baltimore home amid the monied serenity of Roland Park, far from The Wire’s housing projects, Tyler is no quavering recluse shoved by her publicity-hungry publisher
into the spotlight. Looking a good decade younger than 70, she has the air of the librarian she once was — but the nice kind who wants the books off the shelves, circulating. She could teach a master class in media charm as she chats about her life, her family and her new novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye (Knopf, $24.95), on sale today.
Asked why she has switched from her e-mail-only interview policy, Tyler responds, “Why not? It’s like when my husband proposed and I thought, ‘Oh, why not?’ ” Say hello to ghosts
The Beginner’s Goodbye is a ghost story. Its narrator, Aaron Woolcott, works for his family’s Baltimore publishing house, Woolcott Publishing. After a tree falls on his house, sending a heavy, old-fashioned TV set into his wife’s chest and killing her, he finds himself a widower. A gentle tale of memory, regret, family bonds, reconciliation and love, it explores Aaron’s journey back from paralyzing grief, assisted by his wife’s periodic reappearances.
In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote: “This is no gothic ghost story nor chronicle of a man unraveling in his grief, but rather an uplifting tale of love and forgiveness. By the end of this wonderful book, you’ve lived the lives and loves of these characters in the best possible way.”
The freak accident that propels the plot emerged from Tyler’s own maternal anxiety when her daughters were young. “There was a huge oak tree leaning over the children’s bedroom that I had checked every year,” she says.
Though Tyler weaves real-life details into her novels — Aaron moves in with his sister in the North Baltimore neighborhood of Wyndhurst after the tree falls on his house off Cold Spring Lane, which you pass on the way to Tyler’s own house — she cautions, “As always in my novels, the events I described had nothing to do with any part of my life.”
But, she continues, “I’ve noticed that my books do reflect certain stages of my life, usually after they’ve had a few years to settle: the experience of having children, or growing older, or losing a husband.”
Tyler’s husband of 34 years, Taghi Modarressi, died in 1997 of lymphoma.
The couple moved from Montreal to Baltimore for his career as a child psychiatrist. “It was a very hard city to break into,” she says. Even her second
“I’ve noticed that my books do reflect certain stages of my life.”
daughter, who was born in Baltimore, doesn’t quite qualify as a true native, she insists.
Though she considers herself an outsider, Tyler says of the city and its citizens she has immortalized, “I like the quirkiness, their grittiness.”
“Anne could write about any city,” proclaims another Baltimore legend, filmmaker and writer John Waters, director of Hairspray. “She could never leave the house and write great fiction.”
A friend of the author — both are avid readers and discuss books — Waters is also a huge admirer who says the fixation on Tyler’s connection to Baltimore obscures her achievements as a fiction writer.
“She beautifully captures regular people who are not trying to be noticed,” Waters says. “She writes about real life.”
As a filmmaker, he would love to see a foreign director adapt her books — “a European art film director, someone with a fresh eye.”
It is Tyler’s own eye that sends fellow authors into raptures. Like a modern Jane Austen, Tyler creates small worlds
where she depicts in minutest detail the intimate bonds of friendship and family. Eudora Welty famously announced, “If I could have written the last sentence of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, I’d have been happy the rest of my life.”
Tyler has her detractors. In an un
flattering review of The Beginner’s Goodbye, The Washington Post’s Ron Charles wrote, “It’s 2007, but the Internet has passed over Woolcott Publishing, which glides along in this model-train version of an American city that looks closer to Mayberry R.F.D. than to the largest city in Maryland.” In a famous 1986 take-down of The Accidental Tourist, the Chicago Tribune’s John Blades crowned Tyler “our foremost Nutrasweet novelist.”
Sweet (real or artificial) is not how an admiring John Lewis, the arts and culture editor of Baltimore magazine, sees Tyler. He says the novelist explores the themes of death and encroaching decay. Lewis places Tyler among Baltimore’s creative triumvirate, along with Waters and The Wire’s writer/producer David Simon.
“She’s a very famous Baltimorean, but she is so incredibly private that people leave her alone,” Lewis says.
(Not entirely. Local media wrote about the widowed Tyler’s relationship — now ended —with Washington, D.C., chef Mark Furstenberg.)
But she does reach out. After he published an essay about her work in 2001, Lewis received a “really sweet thankyou note,” he says.
But Tyler is a no-show on the literary scene. She doesn’t teach or do book tours. Instead, she keeps to her writing schedule as if the muse has her punching a time clock.
“I have to go to my writing room five days a week,” she says. “I have to put in my time.” She writes in longhand on unlined white paper. (“It really bothers me to have a line on a paper.”) She does not keep her computer nearby when writing. “You would hear that little ding of e-mail,” she notes.
With silence, she says, “you can better hear your characters talking.”
Human beings — real or made up — fascinate Tyler: “I don’t have intellectual curiosity, I have curiosity about people.”
Raised by Quaker parents, Tyler was born in Minnesota, the eldest of four children and the only daughter. She spent much of her childhood in North Carolina. As a girl sharing her room with her younger brother, she would lie in bed at night telling herself stories until he would complain, “Mama, Anne is whispering again.”
After graduating from Duke, Tyler pursued a graduate degree in Russian studies. She returned to the North Carolina university after graduate school to work in the library as a Russian bibliographer. Foreign languages and love
This position sounds more impressive than it was. “It was like kindergarten,” says Tyler, who enjoyed the job. “I was neatly filling out index cards.”
Though Tyler says she never quite mastered speaking Russian, she did learn another language — Farsi — as a surprise for her Iranian-born husband. They met when Tyler’s housemates invited the Duke psychiatric resident to dinner.
The evening started off badly, with Tyler so annoyed to see a stranger at the table that her future husband said to her, “It wonders me why you are so hostile.”
Obviously, things improved. “I chose with amazing wisdom,” she says, when she decided to marry the 30-year-old from Tehran when she was 21.
His death at 65 when Tyler was 56 meant he never met his grandchildren, a particular grief to Tyler and her daughters — one is an artist and the other a children’s book writer and illustrator — because he had a special bond with babies. He established a Baltimore clinic to help infants who failed to thrive.
“Being widowed is just unbearably sad from start to finish; there’s no one most-painful part of it,” says Tyler, who never remarried.
And, alas, Tyler did not experience but rather imagined the comforting plot of The Beginner’s Goodbye. Asked whether her husband ever returned, as Aaron’s dead wife did, the novelist responds:
“No, Taghi has never appeared to me.”