Book Review: "Back When We Were Grown-Ups" by Anne Tyler

I spent a lot of time on my MA Degree reading Anne Tyler because of the fact she was like a comfort read. But since then, for some reason I have not read much and only got back into her with her new book "The Redhead By the Side of the Road". To pick up on her stuff, I have tried to get back into her writing style. However, I have found that one thing has since become true: my reading tastes have altered slightly. I am finding it more difficult to become lost in her novels instead, I analyse the characters and scrutinise the structure of them. I blame my degrees for this and yet, I still do have a fascination with Anne Tyler since she has this vision of the faults of modern life that normal people simply do not have - it is like she has some sort of higher consciousness that we are not privy too.

I continued my reading of her in order to get back into this blend between the modern and post-modern by making my second book "Back When We Were Grown-Ups". The title being a bit of a giveaway itself, I did not think I would actually find a near Freaky Friday situation where Anne Tyler was concerned though, that would be pretty cool. I was dead wrong. I definitely did find a Freaky Friday situation. The message that women do not simply 'get old' but 'grow older' is the underlying theme and message here - though the writing style has not lived up to her usual output.

This book is about a woman who seems to wake up in the wrong body. Most people would call this novel a 'comedy of manners' but instead, I am going to classify it as a satire of the modern day and messages that are put out about how life and ageing works. I have never really read a bad book by Anne Tyler and though this is not a bad book, I really do not like the way it opens. Sounding cliché and a bit underdone for something by her, it reads like the opening to a children's book. Though, this could be for the reason of presenting the character's age as lower than expected for her:

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. She was fifty-three years' old by then - a grandmother. Wide and soft dimpled, with two short wings of dry, fair hair flaring almost horizontally from a centre part. Laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. A loose and colourful style of dress edging dangerously close to Bag Lady. Give her credit: most people her age would say it was too late to make any changes. What's done is done, they would say. No use trying to alter things at this late date. It did occur to Rebecca to say that. But she didn't."

I was surprised when I read this because never before had an Anne Tyler book had an introduction that sounded like it was out of a children's book. When it came to the rest of the book itself though, the start does not really fit with the whole vibe and extended metaphor of ageing, the way in which it is written to clearly convey a message of ageing in women and how it is different to the way in which men age and the abrupt nature of how everything begins to unfold and we realise the key differences between when women get old and when women grow older through the complexities within how the young wisen up.

To conclude, I do not think that this was your typical Anne Tyler novel and though the concept seemed great, the writing style change was not for me. It threw me off a bit.