While many of her contemporaries are playing canasta, she’s releasing her 25th book. There’s no mystery to it, Tyler says: Start on Page 1, then keep writing.
Anne Tyler and I sat facing one another on a couch overlooking a man-made pond at her retirement community outside of Baltimore. She moved there in 2022 and likes the place well enough, with its woodsy walking trails, salt water pool and art studio.
But when I asked Tyler, who is 83, what clubs or activities she’s joined at the sprawling facility, her answer was an apologetic “Nothing?”
Tyler is too busy writing books. Her 25th novel, “Three Days in June,” comes out on Feb. 11, and she’s already percolating another.
“I absolutely have to pick up a pen every weekday morning,” she said, opening a drawer to show her collection of Uni-Ball Signos in black ink. “They’re non-friction. I used to wear a Band-Aid on my finger, and now I don’t need one.”
This is what passes for a revelation from Tyler, who rarely gives interviews and gracefully dodges questions about work. It’s not that she’s secretive or superstitious about her “craft” (a word she’d never use in this context). She just doesn’t understand what the hoopla is about: She established a writing routine and stuck with it, simple as that.
Tyler has now been a fixture of the literary world for more than 60 years.
When her first book, “If Morning Ever Comes” was published in 1964, the Times’s critic described it as “an exceedingly good novel, so mature, so gently wise and so brightly amusing that, if it weren’t printed right there on the jacket, few readers would suspect that Mrs. Tyler was only 22.”
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
