Back When We Were Grownups * Anne Tyler

The Heartwarming, Bittersweet Quest to Reclaim a Forgotten Self. Rebecca Davitch is a fifty-three-year-old grandmother who has spent decades running a chaotic Baltimore catering business and managing a sprawling, eccentric family of stepchildren. She is universally celebrated as the ultimate party host—a warm, dependable woman who brings joy to everyone around her. But her comfortable, exhausting routine faces an absolute structural crisis during a loud family dinner when she looks around the room and asks herself a calculation-shattering question: "Am I turned into the wrong person?"Realizing she has spent her entire life fulfilling the blueprint of a deceased husband's family rather than her own dreams, Rebecca launches a frantic, deeply funny tracking operation into her own past. She tracks down her serious, long-lost college fiancé, attempting to reconstruct the quiet, intellectual girl she used to be back before she became a grownup. Written with the peerless psychological realism and cozy domestic wit of Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Tyler, this delightful contemporary classic leaves readers with a comforting, high-utility blueprint for self-discovery and family forgiveness.