Anne Tyler ‘s Concern with Family Continues in Three Days in June (2025)
As I wrote in an earlier review, Anne Tyler has published, 26 novels since 1964, along with numerous short stories, and many book reviews. Nearly all of her novels are set in the Baltimore area where she has spent most of her adult life. In 1967, her husband, Taghi Modaarressi, a psychiatrist and novelist himself, joined the faculty at the University of Maryland Medical School. In the 1980s he established the Center for Infant study in Baltimore and the Cold Spring Family Center Therapeutic Nursery in Pimlico, Maryland. Since her husband’s death in 1997, Tyler has continued to live and write in the Roland Park area of Baltimore.
Tyler began writing novels in the late 1960 but took a five-year break in the 70s when her daughters were born. Since the late 70s, however, she has been a full-time novelist. As I wrote in a review of French Braid (2022), Tyler’s power as a novelist lies in her understanding of family dynamics, her knowledge of “difference,” her emphasis on realistic detail, and her ability to create moving characters who deal with conflict between family and art. Tyler continues her interest in family issues in Three Days in June, a short, but intense novel published in January of this year.
Brief reviews of three of her best-known, earlier novels reveal the variety in her treatment of families, usually beset with the issues that many face. Tyler’s “breakout” novel was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), a finalist in 1983 for the Pulitzer Prize. Tyler set the novel in Baltimore; the major characters are the Tulls. Family trauma evolves when the father deserts his children, leaving them to be a raised by their stern, perfectionist mother. None of the children achieves the success that their mother has demanded, but they still manage to achieve some degree of resolution and happiness.
The Accidental Tourist (1985) achieved even greater fame than Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985. A Hollywood movie, adapted from the novel, starred William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, and Geena Davis, who won an Oscar for her performance. In this novel, Tyler features a marriage torn apart by the murder of the couple’s only son. Writing, this time with more humor, Tyler depicts family tension, but she offers partial solution to their problems.
In her twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread (2015), Tyler tells the story of the Whitshank family of Baltimore who seem ordinary but actually hide internal conflict involving family secrets, jealousy, and sibling rivalry. The novel was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in 2015. The family comes together as the parents, Abby and Red, begin to age and need the help of their four children all of whom have problems of their own. Abby, suffering from serious memory lapses, is killed while walking the family dog. Her survivors uncover many family secrets and. resolve some of the issues that have plagued their lives. Reviewing this novel, The Scotsman asserted that “Nobody. . . writes about family life like Tyler, . . . finding quiet drama in ordinary life in a way that catches both its profundity and its transience.”
The Scotsman comment certainly applies to Tyler’s most recent novel, Three Days in June. In this near- novella, Tyler creates a less troubled Baltimore family but one that has its own secrets. Tyler covers three days in the lives of the Gaines family– the wedding weekend of Debbie Baines, the daughter of a long-divorced couple, Gail and Max. The novel evolves primarily through the perspective of Gail, the story’s narrator.
Three Days in June begins at the private school where Gail, formerly a math teacher, has been assistant headmistress for over ten years. At the end of the school day on the Friday before Debbie’s wedding, Gail’s boss, the headmistress, tells her that she plans to retire and will be replaced by a young woman from out-of-state who has a Doctorate in Education. Since this replacement plans to bring her own assistant; Gail, in effect, is being fired—after expecting to replace the current headmistress, who bluntly. tells Gail that she lacks “the people skills” essential to the position.
Shocked by her dismissal, Gail begins to ponder the possibility that her lack of personal warmth has ultimately ruined both her career and her marriage to Max who loved her in spite of her emotional restraint. Her troubled isolation ends when Max, who lives on the Eastern Shore of Delaware, arrives for the wedding. Accompanied by an orphaned cat, he had planned to stay at his daughter’s apartment, but her live-in fiancé is allergic to cats and he ends ups at Gail’s house.
Tyler follows events of the wedding weekend, revealing more secrets and giving the novel an almost conventional “happy ending.” On CBS Sunday Morning on May 25 of this year, Tyler now 83, revealed that she is currently working on her final novel. She says, “Well, I’m going to be writing this [next] book forever, and when I finish it, if I do finish it before I die, I will rewrite it. And if I’m still not dead, I will rewrite it again, because I’m not going to bring out another book. I’m horrified that I have 25 books in a list in the front of this latest novel.”
