Born in Minneapolis in 1941, Ann Tyler grew up in North
Carolina. She lived in a North Carolina Quaker commune before she and her family settled in Raleigh. She studied under novelist
Reynolds Price at Duke University in Raleigh, where she won the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing. After her graduation
from Duke, at the age of 19, she did graduate work in Russian Studies at Columbia University. In 1963, she married Taghi Mohammed
Mondarressi, an Iranian-born psychiatrist. She wrote her first novels while they lived together in Montreal, Quebec. Today
they live in Baltimore and she continues to write fiction that explores the lives of characters trapped by the past and unable
to truly experience and enjoy life. Tylers novels often explores the possibility of a happy accident that could change the
lives of her lonely characters and open new opportunites for personal growth to them. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons,
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
The first of her novels that I read, and my personal favorite,
was Accidental Tourist (1985). I also enjoyed the excellent motion picture adaptation, The Accidental Tourist
(1985), starring William Hurt, Kathleen Turner and Geena Davis. Both were funny, touching, and remarkably true to life, albeit
the lives of some highly eccentric charcaters.
Accidental Tourist
tells the story of Macon Leary whose marriage has colapsed in the ruins of he and his
wifes grief at the loss of their 12-year-old son -- shot in the course of the holdup of a fast food store. He moves in with
his two divorced brothers and his spinster sister, thus settling down "safe among the people he'd started out with."
Macon is a travel writer who hates to travel. In fact, he hates
any change from his ordinary routine. He writes a series of guidebooks called Accidental Tourist for businessmen who
hate travel as much as he does, or at least nearly as much. He is firmly entrenched in a rut by loneliness and an unwillingness
to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel Pritchett, an eccentric and dominating dog-obedience trainer. Muriel
turns his insular world upside down. Meeting Muriel thrusts him headlong into a remarkable reengagement with life. This novel
chronicles his journey from lonely self-absorption to an 'accidental' new life with Muriel.
