SOURCE: Rose, Ellen Cronan. “A Fork in the Road.” Women's Review of Books 28, nos. 10-11 (July 2001): 30.

In the following review, Rose offers a favorable assessment of Back When We Were Grownups.

“Wasn't it strange how certain moments, now and then—certain turning points in a life—contained the curled and waiting seeds of everything, that would follow?” Rebecca Davitch asks herself forty pages into Anne Tyler's new novel [Back When We Were Grownups]. The moment she has in mind happened when she was nineteen years old, attending an engagement party for her college roommate in a Baltimore row house whose first floor—named The Open Arms—was rented out for parties. As she was laughing at the DJ's choice of a record, the eldest son of the family who owned The Open Arms came up to her and said “I see you're having a wonderful time.” A few...