EBOOK Back When We Were Grownups

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Anne Tyler&'s The Beginner&'s Goodbye. "e;Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered that she had turned into the  wrong person."e; So Anne Tyler opens this irresistible new novel. The woman 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 vocationsomething 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 divorce 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 un-awares by the question of who she really is.  How she answers ithow she tries to recover her girlhood self, that dignified grownup  she had once beenis the story told in this beguiling, funny, and deeply moving novel. As always with Anne Tyler&'s novels, once we enter her world it is hard to leave.  But in Back When We Were Grownups she so sharpens our perceptions and awakens so  many untapped feelings that we come away not only refreshed and delighted, but also  infinitely wiser.