My Reminder to Myself: A Guest Post by Anne Tyler

At just 176 pages, Anne Tyler’s latest is a big-hearted, charming and funny story about motherhood, marriage and life. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author has penned an exclusive essay for us on writing Three Days in June, down below.

Dear Reader,

Any time I come across one of my novels a while after I’ve finished it, I feel like a mother cat meeting one of her grown kittens.  “Did I write that?” I want to ask.  “Could you remind me what it’s about?”

So when Three Days in June arrived in the mail as a printed galley proof, some months after I’d sent in the manuscript, I read it almost as a stranger might. And what surprised me was how optimistic it seemed.

After all, I’d started writing it in the depths of the pandemic. My only outings then had been my weekly trips to the supermarket, where instead of smiling at the cashier I merely squinched my eyes a bit above my N95 mask.

On top of that, the plot had the potential for considerable strife and annoyance: a long-divorced couple is forced to spend three days together during their daughter’s wedding. At one point, I tossed the whole project aside for several months because it was depressing me. In fact, a lot of things depressed me, back then. I had all but given up reading, even, because other people’s books were depressing me too.

Yet when I began reading that galley proof, I found myself smiling. And eventually, even laughing.

Thank heaven for Gail Baines, my crusty, difficult, highly unsocial heroine. As so often happens with characters in books, she stepped in and took over, by and by. “I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things,” she announced forthrightly. And later, when her mother said she would hate to die on her granddaughter’s wedding day: “Oh, we just wouldn’t have told her till after the ceremony.”

What I realize now is that Three Days in June was my reminder to myself, during a dark time, of how unexpectedly quirky and funny people in general can turn out to be. My hope is that my readers will be reminded as well.

Anne Tyler