Readers Place

Anne Tyler interview/review

1. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?

It was a short story — Eudora Welty’s “The Wide Net.” When I read about Edna Earle, who could spend all day pondering how the tail of the C got through the loop of the L on the Coca-Cola sign, it was a kind of revelation: I knew dozens of people like Edna Earle — small-town, ordinary. I just didn’t know you could write about them. What are your favorite books, and what makes them special to you? Oh, that list would change almost daily. But for the moment, I’d say:

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, because it’s so fresh and immediate and heartbreaking that it might have been written yesterday.
• The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty, because it is such a kind book, and it so warmly welcomes the reader into its small community.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen — a book I turn to in times of flu or the doldrums, so that everyone in it is an old friend by now.
• The Time of Her Life by Robb Forman Dew, for its subtle, deft exploration of the dark side of family life.
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, because it has literature’s best last line.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which really was an entirely new and astonishing kind of book, back before magic realism had been seized upon by imitators.
• The Ordways by William Humphrey — an old-fashioned, absorbing story, gently written and deeply satisfying.
• I Wish This War Were Over by Diana O’Hehir, because it’s as sad and as startlingly funny as real life, and I love its depiction of wartime Washington.
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, which seems to me as nearly perfect as a novel can be — so economical that its entire effect, finally, rests upon four words.
• A Word Child by Iris Murdoch, because it has the plot-line I most envy.

1. What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?

My current favorite is Spellbound (the recent documentary). It shows such a wonderful cross section of America. And I have a longtime affection for a French movie, Dear Detective (not the American remake) because of a hilarious car chase that takes place entirely in first gear. What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you’re writing? I think listening to music while I wrote might affect me too much — I’d write something sentimental or overdone. My favorite sounds while I’m writing are the overheard sounds of an ordinary urban neighborhood — children playing, mothers calling them home, dogs barking.

1. If you had a book club, what would it be reading?

Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, because people either love it or hate it so passionately that it always starts a lively discussion. What are your favorite kinds of books to give — and get — as gifts? Even at my age, I like to be given children’s picture books. They can pack so much into so few words. And picture books are always what I give new babies. My lifelong favorite picture book is Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House. I must have bought several dozen copies of it. I think it says everything possible about change and loss and the passage of time.

1. Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you’re writing?

On my desk I keep a little antique lap desk that my husband and daughters gave me many years ago. It has just the right slant for writing on in longhand, and it’s positioned so it faces a window looking out into a dogwood tree, in a room that’s so minuscule it must once have been a baby’s room. Many writers are hardly “overnight success” stories.

1. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?

My first novel somehow managed, during its two-mile trip in a mail truck to my agent, to get completely chewed up. I don’t mean just ruffled a little; I mean that every single page had been wadded into a little ball. I had to spend the next several weeks retyping it on my manual typewriter. Now I think it might have been a message from heaven: that novel never did sell.

1. If you could choose one new writer to be “discovered,” who would it be?

My favorite almost-new writer of the moment is Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The parents in that book make such terrible mistakes, and yet they’re convincingly presented as loving and well-meaning and good at heart. What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered? Don’t “look” to be discovered. Just keep writing for all you’re worth. Taken from the Barnes and Noble website.