Anne Tyler interviewed on Goodreads

To mark the release of her 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, the usually-shy Anne Tyler did an interview with NPR last week--her first NPR interview in 35 years--and another on Goodreads, which made the site's April newsletter. In the interview, she talks a bit about her writing process, which I always find fascinating. She writes with a Pilot gel ink pen (I'm guessing her pen preferences have changed since she started writing, as gel inks weren't around in the 1960's) on unlined white paper. I actually know of some twenty-and-thirtysomething writers who hand write at some point in their process as well, so it isn't just a generational thing. At a certain point in her process, she reads aloud into a tape recorder. I believe I've suggested reading your work aloud or having somebody you trust read it to you (see Revision Strategies tab, the article "What if I can't find any problems in my writing?"). There are free digital recording programs such as Audacity that will enable you to record yourself or somebody else reading your work. A ten-dollar mic would do just fine for a voice recording that doesn't have to be stellar quality.

Every Tyler novel is about ordinary people in fairly mundane situations, but it's the quirks she gives them and the sometimes unconventional ways in which they deal with these situations, their search for transcendence--and the subtlety with which Tyler writes--that take her work up a level from "popular" fiction.

For the first time in her career, Tyler has tackled a subject I never thought I'd see her try.  In The Beginner's Goodbye, a grieving widower is visited by the spirit of his dead wife. This subject matter could turn maudlin or didactic in the hands of a less skilled author, so I'm eager to see how Tyler handles it. If you're waiting to find out what her personal views are on the subject of an afterlife, you'll have a long wait.

My personal favorite Tyler novels and which would I recommend?  Glad you asked.  Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, and Breathing Lessons. Among her more difficult, darker reads are:  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Amateur Marriage, Celestial Navigation, A Patchwork Planet. I have also read and appreciated A Slipping-Down Life, If Morning Ever Comes, Digging to America, and Ladder of Years. A Slipping-Down Life and If Morning Ever Comes are two of her earliest novels; it's interesting to see how her writing has evolved.  She admits that she wouldn't recommend any of her first four novels to anyone to read. That kind of modesty is refreshing and rare these days, and my personal opinion is that she's better at her worst than many authors are at their best.