Because she can still nail it: that's why I remain an Anne Tyler fan.

From A Spool of Blue Thread:


Here's a one paragraph character portrait that is so vivid, so succinct, so spicy and so full of all the right things, you could just put it in a wok and stir-fry!

"As a girl, whe'd been a fey sprite of a thing.  She'd worn black turtlenecks in winter and peasant blouses in summer; her hair had hung long and straight down her back while most girls clamped their pageboys into rollers every night.  She wasn't just poetic but artistic , too, and a modern dancer, and an activist for any worthy cause that came along ...

Her school was her (step-sister) Merrick's school, private and girls-only and posh, and though Abby was only a scholarship student, she was the star there, the leader.  In college, she plaited her hair into cornrows and picketed for civil rights.  She graduated near the top of her class and became a social worker, what a surprise, venturing into Baltimore neighborhoods that none of her old schoolmates knew existed.  Even after she married Red ... did she turn ordinary?  Not a chance.  She insisted on natural childbirth, breast-fed her babies in public, served her family wheat-germ and home-brewed yoghurt, marched against the Vietnam War with her youngest astride her hip sent her children to public schools.  Her house was filled with her handicrafts -- macrame plant-hangers and colorful woven serapes.  She took in strangers off the streets, and some of them stayed for weeks.  There was no telling who would show up at her dinner table."

Or the odd, but so daily thing we all find ourselves going through:

(Having already looked there), "they headed for the stairs anyway, like people hunting their keys in the same place over and over because they can't believe that isn't where they are."

God, yes.

"Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity.  It was not an attractive quality, in her children's opinion."

Yes, but how close is pity to empathy!   And to be -- suddenly or not -- understood, is so deeply affirmative.  It lifts you out of the certainty of your solitude and tells you wait, wait -- I've lived there too.  I have felt that, too.

Sharp line that differentiates the two.  The main thing, I think, is just to move toward someone... and reach forth.