A Spool of Blue Thread

by Anne Tyler

A Spool of Blue Thread is the only one of my books that has ever caused me to say, when I reread it many years later, “Oh! Why, this book is actually . . . Why, it turns out I kind of like it!” It’s also the only book I planned never to finish writing. That’s because it was my twentieth, and I worried that people might start to think I was just “churning them out,” as a neighbor of mine once put it. So I decided this one should be my last. But that meant that once it was done, I’d have nothing more to work on, and work is what keeps me happy. What to do, therefore? Well, go on writing this one forever—in fact, until I died. Follow a single family for generation after generation. And to guarantee that I wouldn’t have to stop when I reached the present day, I would follow them in reverse. I’d begin with the current generation and go back to the parents and then to the parents’ parents, all the way to prehistory if need be. Except it turned out that when I reached the parents’ grandparents, I couldn’t work up enough interest in them. They seemed too meager-spirited, and without any underlayers. So A Spool of Blue Thread came to an end after all. I did hate to see it go.

But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house. “It’s him!” you say. “He came! We knew he would; we always …” But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks.

Back in my daughters’ college days, I seemed to be forever waiting for them at the airport. This was when you could still wait at the gate, and I can’t tell you how many times I lit up at the sight of a total stranger filing in off the jetway. Often there wasn’t the slightest resemblance. I have been known to look squarely at a middle-aged blonde and momentarily mistake her for one of my dark-haired, dark-eyed girls. I thought of that when I was writing about the man in the tank top whom the Whitshanks imagine to be Denny. I worried this was too far-fetched, but then I remembered those airport scenes and thought, No, it could have happened, all right. It’s amazing how you can delude yourself when you’re longing to see a loved one.

The disappointments seemed to escape the family’s notice, though. That was another of their quirks: they had a talent for pretending that everything was fine. Or maybe it wasn’t a quirk at all. Maybe it was just further proof that the Whitshanks were not remarkable in any way whatsoever.

Remember how, whenever you went home after school with one of your friends, that friend would go into a little whirl of show-and-tell the instant you reached her house? “Here’s our new couch,” and “This is my hamster,” and “Wait till you taste my mom’s Dreamsicle pie!” And I, of course, would do the same whenever a friend came to my house. There’s something touching about the way that even the most ordinary family considers itself to be special.

So for all these years—thirty-six, now—the Whitshanks had watched from a distance while the slender young parents next door grew thicker through the middle and their hair turned gray, and their daughters changed from children to young women.

A Spool of Blue Thread is my only book in which I myself am a character, although a very minimal one. The Whitshanks’ “next-door people” at the beach in chapter 5—the two parents who age and gray as the years pass, the two daughters growing up, and eventually the two sons-in-law and two grandchildren—that’s my own family. I am the mother. I’m not sure that even my own daughters realized this when they read it.

“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”

A Baltimore woman I used to know, who was approaching 100 when I met her and had a generally feisty nature, used to tell people who marveled at her age that she absolutely refused to die before she found out how things ended. I laughed, but I knew what she meant. I thought it might have to do with being a mother: we spend so long fantasizing about our children’s perfect happiness that we start believing we might guarantee it if only we could stick around long enough.

One thing that parents of problem children never said aloud: it was a relief when the children turned out okay, but then what were the parents supposed to do with the anger they’d felt all those years?

I’m not so sure about this one. Maybe those parents still feel anger, I’m thinking now; it’s just that they don’t voice it to the rest of us. Oh, we parents are so vigilant about protecting our children from the outside world’s disapproval! I have no idea what’s going through the heads of the parents who have been through real hell with their children. It was probably presumptuous of me even to hazard a guess.

“Who said, ‘You’re only ever as happy as your least happy child?’ ”

Well, I know Michelle Obama said it, but I also know she wasn’t the first. (And I sincerely doubt that Socrates was.) As I recall, the remark was just sort of in the air a few years ago, and it stayed with me because I so completely agreed with it.

You wake in the morning, you’re feeling fine, but all at once you think, “Something’s not right. Something’s off somewhere; what is it?” And then you remember that it’s your child—whichever one is unhappy.

It makes me smile now to think of a discussion my husband and I had when we were deciding when to start a family. Were we ready yet, we asked each other, to devote eighteen whole years to another human being? Eighteen! Ha! My daughters are in their fifties now, and instead of taking them off my worry list I’ve just added my grandchildren and my sons-in-law.

Didn’t anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven’s sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House?

Now I’m wondering what I overlooked when I considered my own grandparents. Well, we can pretty much assume they didn’t smoke pot; but you know what I mean. I notice how passing teenagers flick their eyes toward us old folks and sum us up at a glance and move on, and I think, You people have no idea!

For years, she had been in mourning for the way she had let her life slip through her fingers. Given another chance, she’d told herself, she would take more care to experience it. But lately, she was finding that she had experienced it after all and just forgotten, and now it was returning to her.

I used to think that when I got old, I could sit in a rocking chair and watch my entire past life stream before me like a movie. I can’t imagine where I got that idea—maybe from reading novels? But at any rate: no. Like Abby, I am visited by unexpected flashes rather than the whole narrative. Abby’s memory of that Corningware pan handle, for instance: That was my personal donation to her, from the early 1960s when all brides were given sets of Corningware for their weddings. I hadn’t thought of Corningware in years! But all at once, decades later, up it popped out of nowhere. I can’t wait to see what comes to me next.

“It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.”

I wrote that when I was in my early seventies, and now that I’m eighty I want to write it all over again but in bold type and capital letters. I’m trying to figure how to arrange it so that after my death, all that my daughters will need to do is throw out my toothbrush and donate my one set of clothes to charity. So far it’s not working out that way, though.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Having long ago resigned myself to any “churning it out” accusations, I’ve gone on to write four more books after my so-called last one. The most recent is French Braid. It’s about a family that’s always appeared to get along fine, and yet by the end of the book they’ve almost completely lost touch with one another. The question the book asks is, Why? What went wrong? I had a wonderful time writing it; I like nothing better than tracking a group of characters over great swoops of time. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57329182-french-braid