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.