‘It seemed wrong to write about normal life after that horrendous election’: US novelist Anne Tyler

At 83, The Accidental Tourist author discusses the secret to a good marriage, publishing her 25th book and why she can no longer keep politics out of her novels

“I’m ashamed,” Anne Tyler says of the publication of her new novel, Three Days in June, a typically Tyleresque off‑kilter romantic comedy about a long-divorced, mismatched couple. “I didn’t even realise I was up to 25. If you look at a writer’s work and you see that many titles you think, ‘Well, it can’t be very serious work.’ But that’s what happened.”

The seriousness of Tyler’s fiction, which includes much-loved novels Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist and the Pulitzer prize-winning Breathing Lessons, has bothered critics for decades. How could a writer of such witty, warm, kind novels about middle-class families that contain very little historical context, no politics or sex, even, really be one of America’s finest living novelists, as so many have claimed? Not to mention her prodigiousness. The author herself couldn’t give two hoots. Unswayed by literary fashion or criticism, she has been writing the novels that interest her, and her devoted readership, for 60 years. “How we handle day-to-day life as we go through it, with its disappointments and its pleasures, that’s all I want to know,” she says.

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