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She spends the rest of the novel attempting to answer these questions--and trying to resurrect her older, extinguished self. Should she take up the research she began back in college on Robert E. Lee's motivation for joining the Confederacy? More to the point, should she take up with her college sweetheart, who's now divorced and living within easy striking range? None of these quick fixes pans out exactly as Rebecca imagines. What she emerges with is a kind of radiant resignation, best expressed by 100-year-old Poppy on his birthday: "There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be." A tautology, perhaps, but Tyler's delicate, densely populated novel makes it stick.
Yes, Poppy. There are also characters named NoNo, Biddy, and Min Foo--the sort of saccharine roll call that might send many a reader scampering in the opposite direction. But Tyler knows exactly how to mingle the sweet with the sour, and in Back When We Were Grownups she manages this balancing act like the old pro she is. Even the familiar backdrop--shabby-genteel Baltimore, which resembles a virtual game preserve of Tylerian eccentrics--seems freshly observed. Can any human being really resist this novel? It is, to quote Rebecca, "a report on what it was like to be alive," and an appealingly accurate one to boot. --James Marcus
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. "Youll want to turn back to the first chapter the moment you finish the last. PEOPLEOn the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocationsomething she married into after Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his familys crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was his family business. What caught Joe's fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited divorce with three little girls swept Beck into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended familyplus a child of their ownand hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms.Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family party, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. Is she an impostor in her own life? Is it indeed her own life? How she answershow she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once beenis the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's #1 national bestseller, now in paperback, is a tender novel about aging, marriage, friendship, motherhood . . . and one extraordinary woman living an ordinary life. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780345446862
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