It’s the birthday of Anne Tyler (b. 1941), an immensely popular novelist who never intended to be a writer. She’s written 22 novels and is best known for novels about family relationships in all their glory and dysfunction, such as Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and the Pulitzer-winning Breathing Lessons (1988).

(Not a fan of Anne Tyler? No need to cause any trouble; just move along. But do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.)

Tyler was born to Quaker parents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in Quaker communities in the South, including a commune called Celo Community in Yancy County, North Carolina. When Tyler was 11, the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where for the first time she went to public school; her upbringing left her feeling like an outsider for most of her life (not a terrible thing for a writer). Her favorite book growing up was Little Women, which she reread and reread, and she longed for adulthood because she imagined she’d get to read for 12 hours straight without interruption. (Sigh.)

Tyler went to Duke University at 16 on a full scholarship and studied Russian, still not planning to be a writer, but while there took classes from the author Reynolds Price, who was blown away by Tyler’s preternatural gifts as a writer. She wrote short stories that were published in the Duke literary journal and began winning prizes. After a year of grad school at Columbia University in New York City, Tyler got a job in the library at Duke and met her husband, Taghi Modarressi, an Iranian writer and child psychiatrist. (Modarressi died at age 65 in 1997.) Tyler’s first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, came out in 1964 and her second, The Tin Can Tree, the next year, and then Tyler spent several years occupied with their two young daughters; she didn’t write again until 1970, by which time the family lived in Baltimore—where Tyler has lived ever since and where most of her fiction is set. She began getting more national attention with Celestial Navigation (1974); Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant was her first bestseller.

Tyler’s cites Eudora Welty as her biggest influence. Tyler loves Calvin and Hobbes and Anna Karenina, does not believe in God or consider herself spiritual, and thinks Wuthering Heights is silly. Of her own work, she says, “Reading my own books always feels like lying awake in a bedroom I’ve painted myself; the mistakes are so noticeable and so upsetting. But smudges and all, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant remains closest to my heart, probably because I feel that it says most about how I feel families work, and how they don’t work.” (Read more here.) Tyler’s most recent novel is Clock Dance (2018). (My favorite Anne Tyler novel is Saint Maybe, published in 1991. What’s yours?)

Have a weirdly functional Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.