Back When We Were Grownups

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.

You'll want to turn back to the first chapter the moment you finish the last." --PEOPLE

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 married into after Joe Davitch spotted her at an engagement party in his family's 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 divorcé with three little girls swept Beck 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 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 answers--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.

Author: Anne Tyler
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04/09/2002
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.53lbs
Size: 8.16h x 5.54w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9780345446862
ISBN10: 0345446860
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Literary
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Sagas

About the Author
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 but grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. This is Anne Tyler's fifteenth novel;
her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore.