If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
This question seems familiar. On 25 June, the prompt asked which book ending I would change. I wrote the following in response https://theafterworddotblog.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=3491&action=edit
Exactly one month later, I was asked which book ending I would rewerite. Either the prompt writer has a very short memory, or I have wandered into Groundhog Day.
In the film, Phil Connors keeps waking to the same day. At first, he tries to escape it, then exploit it. Eventually, he discovers that the day will not change until he does. Repetition becomes an invitation to greater attention, generosity and love.
That is not far from the world of Anne Tyler. In Breathing Lessons, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Saint Maybe, families repeat old arguments, misunderstand one another in familiar ways, and carry loyalties and irritations for years. Change rarely arrives with trumpets. More often, someone sees another person more clearly, an old grievance loosens, or mercy interrupts the usual pattern.
So I still would not change the ending of any of her books. The ending belongs to the author. My task as a reader is to receive it and allow it to challenge, unsettle, comfort or enlarge me. Perhaps that is the lesson of both Anne Tyler and Groundhog Day: sometimes the answer is not to rewrite the story, but to become a little different while living through it again.
The Afterword 
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