Back When We Were Grownups (edit title)

Timothy Gray approved Timothy Gray’s request to change the title of Back When We Were Grownups Friday, October 30 2009.

Timothy Gray approved Jennifer L’s request to combine 6 books, including Back When We Were Grownups, Saturday, August 8 2009.

Timothy Gray changed the title of Back When We Were Grownups Saturday, August 8 2009.

Shelfari edited the description of Back When We Were Grownups Saturday, August 1 2009.

• "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the wrong person." So Anne Tyler opens this irresistible new novel. The woman is Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother. Is she an impostor in her own life? she asks herself. Is it indeed her own life? Or is it someone else’s? On the surface, Beck, as she is known to the Davitch clan, is outgoing, joyous, a natural celebrator. Giving parties is, after all, her vocation—something she slipped into even before finishing college, when Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family’s crumbling nineteenth-century Baltimore row house, where giving parties was the family business. What caught his fancy was that she seemed to be having such a wonderful time. Soon this large-spirited older man, a divorcé with three little girls, swept her into his orbit, and before she knew it she was embracing his extended family plus a child of their own, and hosting endless parties in the ornate, high-ceilinged rooms of The Open Arms. Now, some thirty years later, after presiding over a disastrous family picnic, Rebecca is caught un-awares by the question of who she really is. How she answers it—how she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup she had once been—is the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel. As always with Anne Tyler’s novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave. But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also infinitely wiser. From the Hardcover edition.

Shelfari edited the contributors of Back When We Were Grownups Thursday, July 23 2009.

• Added a contributor: Anne Tyler: (Primary Author)

Jennifer L submitted a request to combine 6 books, including Back When We Were Grownups, Wednesday, July 22 2009.

Shelfari edited the first sentence of Back When We Were Grownups Thursday, July 16 2009.

• Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.