Rachel Joyce on A Spool of Blue Thread: ‘Anne Tyler’s skill is in laying skeletons bare’

Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, shares her admiration for Anne Tyler’s 2015 novel, where the ordinary becomes universal and the mundane is transformed with razor-sharp insight

Written by Rachel Joyce

Published January 28, 2025

I make no pretence. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Anne Tyler fan. I may not be able to measure out my life with coffee spoons, but I can definitely measure it out in her novels.

I remember the bookseller who recommended The Amateur Marriage, and that feeling, as I began to read her for the first time, of entering a place where I not only felt welcome but also wanted to stay. I read The Beginner’s Goodbye on a night flight from Canada, the only person awake. I read Redhead by the Side of the Road at that worst point during the pandemic when I was beginning to fear I would never pick up a book again. I took Breathing Lessons to hospital with me when I had my fourth child and, quite honestly, I was tempted to stay as long as I could just so that I could read in relative peace and quiet. I remember reading Saint Maybe and realising you could write about ordinary life and still say something explosive.

(Note. Anne Tyler has the best book titles. They do that thing you want a title to do: they plunk two ideas together that shouldn’t go, and something happens in the middle that is like a story in itself.)

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To step into an Anne Tyler novel is to inhabit a world that becomes more real and known than the one you live in. Her eye misses nothing. Not one lift of an eyebrow, not one word muttered into a hand. She takes the mundane, the day-to-day, the dust beneath the carpet, and she lifts them through the clarity of her prose – prose that never draws attention to itself – to a place where those details transcend the ordinary and become universal.

It is very easy to take the small and make it smaller. But it is much more complicated to present the familiar in a way that makes you feel you both know it and have never seen it before. She is brilliant about loneliness within even a long-standing marriage; she is brilliant about the clumsy misunderstandings and defining moments that slip past, unvoiced; she is brilliant about the tragedy that can come without fanfare in the most prosaic of moments. She is fearlessly unsentimental, seems to have some kind of allergic reaction to hyperbole, and can sum up a character in one cut-glass sentence. (‘Even driving, she gave the impression of floating.’)

Her 20th novel is no exception. Published in 2015, A Spool of Blue Thread was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Like all her fiction, it is set in Baltimore, where Anne Tyler lives herself, and introduces four generations of the Whitshank family, starting with Abby and Red, who are now in their early old age and fell in love on a summer’s day in 1959. It’s a story Abby loves to tell on the wide porch of their family home and one her four grown-up children – and their children, too – love to hear. ‘There was nothing remarkable about the Whitshanks. But like most families, they imagined they were special… They made a little too much of the family quirks.’

She takes the mundane, the day-to-day, the dust beneath the carpet, and she lifts them through the clarity of her prose

Rachel Joyce on Anne Tyler

Like most of us, they are trying to discover who they are. And like most of us, they want to be a little above the ordinary. The house their grandfather built for wealthy clients and then painstakingly engineered to make his own, is a prime example.

From the opening lines, we recognise Abby for the caring and smothering mother she is and we see Red as the more emotionally-awkward and down-to-earth of the two. We see their children; Amanda, who takes charge of most situations, the kindly Stem, who always puts others first, and Jeannie, who is often forgotten in the chaos of family drama. But it is Denny, their fourth child, who takes all the oxygen. He is charming, absent, potentially delinquent, on the run from his own life, and a constant source of worry, annoyance and confusion. He is the only one who does not subscribe to the family myth.

But Abby is experiencing periods of blankness, while Red has suffered a heart attack. It is clear to their children that something must be done. Out of the blue, Denny shows up, promising in his completely unreliable way to take charge, on the very same day that Stem and his drifty wife have also come to take charge. The stage is set for the great unravelling.

Plot for Anne Tyler lies in the passing of time, or in opening a door and discovering three generations sitting down to a family meal

Rachel Joyce

In anyone else’s hands this might be painful, or predictable, but Anne Tyler does it with such razor-sharp wit, such clear-eyed honesty, that it is like following the trail of blue thread of the title. The unknown-ness of those we know. The stories we tell both ourselves and one another, those family myths, the limitations with which we see our parents and the generations before them, the ghosts we inherit without even knowing. Structurally, it is bold, surprising. And she does not flinch from moments of brutal realism, even the sudden death of a character you have come to think of as essential. (I remember the first time I read A Passage to India and was dumbfounded that E.M. Forster could take Mrs Moore away from me, as easily as I had fallen in love with her.)

Anne Tyler’s skill is in laying skeletons bare whilst also acknowledging that these people are not identified by their mistakes. She finds the drama, the complexity, the conflict within the hidden places, the daily places, and the apparently ordinary, because of course there is ultimately no such thing as ordinary. Plot for Anne Tyler lies in the passing of time, or in opening a door and discovering three generations sitting down to a family meal.

In its closing lines, A Spool of Blue Thread leaves us with the impression that life moves on because it always has. What seemed so urgent, spiky and necessary will – with time – become redundant and unwanted. The precious pottery house ‘painted in kindergarten shades of red and green and yellow’ that Abby made before she died will be abandoned on a pile of rubbish because the family will never know its history. Leaving his family behind, Denny vows to change his life in the same moment that a young man beside him on a train cries with his face to the window. The house that has been the centre of family life, and was their grandfather’s greatest dream, the wide-porched house that perpetuated the myth that they were a little more special than anyone else, is now emptied and left behind, ‘a place where the filmy skirted ghosts frolicked and danced on the porch with no one to watch’. What matters is the moment in which something happens, in all its complexity. There are threads that cannot be rewound.