Anne Tyler

Saint Maybe

Anne Tyler was raised in a Quaker community in Raleigh, North Carolina, and once lived on a commune, which instilled in her a sense of distance from the world. At three, she began inventing elaborate stories and reading voraciously. She especially loved Eudora Welty’s writing and its depiction of the ordinary. Writing and illustrating a succession of her own books, Tyler imagined she would be an artist.

From Saint Maybe:

“‘They are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness.’ ‘Okay,’ Ian said. ‘Fine. How much longer till I’m forgiven?’ ‘No, no.’ [Reverend Emmett replied.] ‘The burden is that you must forgive.’”

Entering Duke University at sixteen, in 1957, Tyler took a writing class with the writer Reynolds Price, who helped get her stories published. Notably publicity-shy, she rarely grants interviews and is almost never photographed. Despite her early literary success, once she graduated, Tyler chose not to pursue writing, but Russian studies at Columbia.

In 1963, Tyler married Taghi Modarressi, a child psychiatrist and fiction writer, and they settled in Montreal. Tyler worked as an assistant librarian at McGill University Law School and wrote her two novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965).

In 1967 she moved to Baltimore and in 1977, told a reporter she never planned to leave the house in Baltimore she shared with her husband and two daughters. Modarressi died of cancer in 1997, but Tyler still lives there. She is now at work on what she says is her final book, a generational family saga told in reverse chronology. The working title is “A Spool of Blue Thread.” Anne Tyler’s most recent novel is The Beginner’s Goodbye.

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Ian’s Cherry Cola

In Saint Maybe, Ian passes the little snack shop where he and Cicely used to sit all afternoon over a couple of cherry cokes.

1 oz. whiskey

1 oz. cherry juice

1/2 oz. amaretto

1/2 oz. ginger brandy

2 oz. cherry cola

1 maraschino cherry

In a cocktail shaker add whiskey, cherry juice, amaretto, and brandy and shake for fifteen seconds. Pour over ice, then top off with cherry cola and stir. Serve with additional cherries, if desired. Serves 1.