A Single Day

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What’s a book that completely surprised you?

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Years ago, a writing teacher recommended Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons. It had won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so I knew it came well regarded. Even so, I read it mostly out of respect for my teacher.

Then I loved it.

I wrote a few days ago that I am drawn to books which explore the richness of ordinary life. Breathing Lessons was one of the books that taught me this. After reading it, I quickly devoured Anne Tyler’s other novels as well. I continue to love them.

There is rarely great drama in her work. No elaborate plot machinery. No need to bend reality out of shape. Just ordinary people living ordinary lives, often badly, sometimes bravely, and usually without quite understanding themselves.

Breathing Lessons follows Maggie and Ira Moran as they drive from Baltimore to a funeral and back in a single day. Along the way, their marriage is revealed in all its comedy, irritation, disappointment, tenderness and endurance. Maggie talks too much and meddles too much. Ira withdraws, judges, and makes sense of things too neatly. They exasperate each other. They love each other. They have disappointed each other. They have stayed.

On one level, not much happens. A couple gets in a car. They attend a funeral. They make a few detours. They return home. On another level, a whole marriage is opened up. That was the surprise.

Tyler’s life helps explain the kind of writer she became. Her family lived in Quaker communities in the South and in the mountains of North Carolina, many of them populated by conscientious objectors. When she later entered public school, she felt like an outsider. That sense of being set apart followed her. She once suggested that almost any “setting-apart situation” can help make a writer. I love that idea.

The writer is not necessarily the person who has lived the most dramatic life. The writer is often the person who has stood slightly to one side of ordinary life and watched it carefully.

When Tyler moved to New York as a young woman, she became almost addicted to riding trains and subways. She described herself as an enormous eye, taking things in, turning them over, sorting them out.

That seems to me like the realist writer’s vocation: not to invent a strange world, but to notice the strangeness already present in this one.

Tyler notices families, marriages, houses, meals, errands, habits, disappointments, and the small rituals by which people survive. She notices how people talk past each other. How they hurt each other without meaning to. How they remain mysteries even to those who love them. How an ordinary day can carry years inside it.

Breathing Lessons surprised me because it showed me that ordinary life is not thin. It is dense. It is layered. It is comic, painful, awkward, tender and strange.

The surprise was not a plot twist. It was not a great revelation. It was not some dramatic upheaval.

The surprise was that an ordinary marriage, an ordinary car trip, an ordinary day, could contain so much.

Anne Tyler helped me see that ordinary life is only ordinary when we are not paying attention.