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The
2003 Award
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Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: A.A. Knopf ISBN 0375412530 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| "Once
upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the
wrong person". So begins Back When We Were Grownups. The woman
in question 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 unawares 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 here. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941, and grew up in North Carolina. This is her fifteenth novel: her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. A Patchwork Planet was nominated for the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, U.S.A. |
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Find out more about the author on the following websites:
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