A Spool of Blue Thread

by Anne Tyler

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.