Anne Tyler's Women Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Amateur Marriage

Lindy is Pauline and Michael's oldest daughter. Unlike her siblings, Karen and George, she does not have any chapters from her point of view. She is very perceptive, and when she gets into her teens, she gets heavily into drink, drugs and the beatnik scene, often staying out late with her friends and reading books by Jack Kerouac and Albert Camus. She goes missing and Karen and George try to cover it up for as long as they can, but eventually Michael and Pauline call the police. Though she does come back, she eventually runs off to San Francisco with a group of teenagers.

While in San Francisco, Lindy gets pregnant by a musician and has a son, Pagan, but abandons him after a drug-induced mental breakdown. Pauline finds the boarding house where Pagan is staying, and the retreat/rehab centre where Lindy is living, but she is unable to take Lindy home as Lindy is too mentally unstable to leave. Michael keeps in touch with the manager of the retreat, and Lindy is progressing, but walks out. The Antons do not hear from her for several years.

In the '90s, George - now a father of two - notices a woman following him in a battered old car, and the woman reveals herself to be Lindy. She is married to a man she met in a commune, and has stepchildren, and George fills her in on everything that has happened. She talks to Pagan on the phone, but Pagan shows little enthusiasm. Most of the Antons complain that George did not make Lindy stay so that she could meet them, but Karen agrees with George that Pagan is justified in not wanting to see her. The Antons have a get-together and meet Lindy and her husband, but George finds it a strain and Lindy and Michael are never able to truly repair their relationship.

Answer: Back When We Were Grown-Ups

Rebecca Davitch, née Holmes, is the heroine of 'Back When We Were Grown-Ups'. As a young woman, she was a promising history student and in a relationship with Will Allenby, but leaves him for Joe Davitch, an older man with three daughters. The Davitch family rent their house, the Open Arms, out for parties, and Rebecca meets Joe at her friend Amy's engagement party there. She gets involved in the business and discovers she has a talent for managing parties and acting as a social facilitator. After Joe's death, she runs the business, with family members helping with flowers and catering. (Anne Tyler wrote the book following her husband's death in 1997.)

Rebecca starts to question how her life took such a dramatic turn and considers getting back together with Will, but it does not work out. However, it is implied late in the book that she has feelings for Joe's younger brother Zeb, and Tyler said in an interview that Rebecca and Zeb would later get together. Blythe Danner played Rebecca in the Hallmark movie adaptation.

Answer: Ladder of Years

Susie Grinstead is Delia Grinstead's oldest child and is engaged to Driscoll Avery. She writes to Delia while Delia is staying in Bay Borough and invites her to her wedding. When Delia returns home, she discovers that Susie has called off the wedding, even destroying her veil, because Driscoll was rude to a boy who kept phoning the Grinsteads' house. Delia also learns that while she was away, Susie started her own business, House in a Box, which involved selling people boxes with domestic equipment, and borrowed the money from her grandmother Eleanor. She and her brothers Ramsay and Carroll also moved out after arguing with Sam, their father. Susie is angry with Delia for abandoning them and asks if it was something they did.

Delia and Driscoll investigate the phone calls and discover that they were made by a boy called Paul Cates, who has a crush on a popular girl, Courtney. Courtney gives him her number, but with a couple of digits changed, and he accidentally phones the Grinsteads instead. Both Paul and Courtney are invited to the Grinsteads' for dinner, and Susie and Driscoll get back together.

Answer: Saint Maybe

Daphne Bedloe is the daughter of Danny Bedloe and Lucy Deane (although Ian is suspicious that Danny is not the father), and Agatha and Thomas' half-sister. While Agatha becomes an atheist and stops going to the Church of the Second Chance in her teens, Daphne continues to attend the services. She is the child Ian is closest to. When Agatha talks about setting Ian up with a date, Daphne suggests Miss Pennington, her teacher, and talks Ian into inviting her for dinner. Unfortunately, Ian has also invited Sister Clara, a woman from his church, and is more interested in her.

When Daphne gets into her teens, she is in and out of trouble at school, drinking and smoking weed, and having sex with her boyfriend Gideon. She tells Ian that she is far less naive than he thinks she is. To Agatha's annoyance, she continues to live with Ian and does various dead-end jobs, such as working in a flower shop, though she eventually moves out. She plans to go into partnership with Rita.

Answer: Breathing Lessons

Sugar Tilghman, real name Elizabeth, is one of Maggie Moran's former classmates from high school, and had a reputation as the class beauty. When Serena married Max Gill, they had their classmates sing several pop songs at the wedding, as well as a reading from Kahlil Gibran's 'The Prophet'. Sugar sang 'Born to Be With You' at the wedding, but she does not want to sing it at the funeral as she thinks it is an inappropriate song for a funeral.

She compromises with Serena and sings 'Que Sera, Sera' at the end instead.

Answer: The Amateur Marriage

Anna is a friend of Pauline's, who was with her on the day when she cut her head and had to go to Anton's Grocery for help. Like Pauline, she is not Polish-American, but is completely the opposite to her in personality, being much calmer. She plays the piano at Michael and Pauline's wedding, and later marries a Colonel Stuart and moves to Arizona.

Michael and Anna meet again much later when Pagan, Michael's grandson, shows talent as a guitarist and enlists in a summer music school. Anna is now a piano teacher and is working at the school, and returned to Baltimore after her husband died; she was the one who told Pauline about the summer programme. She and Michael start dating and eventually marry, and Michael moves in with her (which causes problems for Lindy when she tries to look him up in the phone book). She continues to teach into her eighties.

Answer: Back When We Were Grown-Ups

NoNo is one of Joe Davitch's daughters from his previous marriage, along with Patricia (Patch) and Bridget (Biddy). She is a florist who meets her fiancé, Barry Sanborn, when he buys flowers for his secretary. She claims to have psychic powers and has visions of herself in a maid's outfit, feeling that Barry treats her like a servant. The book begins at a picnic where the Davitches have been invited, along with Barry and his son Peter, and Peter falls into a pond. He is very shy and finds it hard to socialise with the other children. Barry and NoNo's wedding takes place at the Open Arms.

Rebecca has dreams about the son she imagines she and Will would have had, a bookish boy who she names Tristram. As she gets to know Peter and discovers he has an interest in science, and is extremely intelligent to boot, she realises that he is the boy who appears in her dreams.

Answer: Ladder of Years

Ellie Miller is a TV weather girl, the ex-wife of Joel Miller and the mother of Noah. According to Belle, Joel worshipped Ellie when they were married and he leaves things just as she left them, but Ellie later reveals that Joel was constantly correcting her on her grammar and criticising the way she spoke. She and her sisters attend their father Nat's wedding to Binky, his carer, though one of the sisters shaved her head in grief. Ellie is angry when she finds out that Binky is pregnant with Nat's child and the retirement home are threatening to evict them.

Delia meets Ellie when she catches Ellie trying to shove Noah into her car, and Ellie accidentally cuts Delia's face when she pushes her away. She drives Delia to a hospital but nearly has an accident, and Delia twists her ankle when she jumps out of the car. Despite this, Ellie and Delia end up becoming friends.

Answer: Saint Maybe

Lucy Dean is Danny Bedloe's wife and has two children, Agatha and Thomas, by her previous husband Tommy. Ian is suspicious of her, as she has expensive clothes, despite not being very well-off, and that Lucy is lying about their daughter Daphne being premature. Ian has to babysit Agatha and Thomas when Lucy goes out with friends, and grows impatient as he has a date with his girlfriend Cicely. When Danny comes home drunk from a party, Ian tells him that Daphne is not his daughter and that he suspects Lucy is cheating on him. Danny responds by killing himself by driving his car into a wall.

Now a widow, Lucy becomes addicted to sleeping pills and suffers from severe depression. She tries to look for jobs, but nobody will hire her, and she takes an overdose and dies. Ian tries to find out about her background with the help of Eli Everjohn, a private detective who tracks down Tommy's mother. Tommy's surname was Dulsimore and he died in a motorbike accident in 1967. Ian goes to visit Tommy's mother and finds out that she did not like Lucy, as she thought Lucy was common and a bad influence on Tommy.

Answer: Breathing Lessons

Maggie Moran is the heroine of 'Breathing Lessons'. She is a nurse in a retirement home and like many of Anne Tyler's couples, she and her husband Ira are complete opposites; Maggie is outgoing, friendly and careless, while Ira is quiet and cynical. She and Ira have an argument on the way to their friend Max Gill's funeral and Maggie gets out of the car. They also stop on the way back to give an old man a lift. Maggie and Ira are supposed to sing 'Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing' at Max's funeral, but Ira refuses, so Maggie duets with Durwood Clegg instead. Serena, Max's widow, kicks her and Ira out of her house at the reception when she catches them about to have sex.

Maggie also has a habit of misunderstanding things and trying to manipulate people by leaving information out or making things up; for instance, in a flashback she sees some dowelling rods and tells Fiona, her son Jesse's ex-wife, that they are for a cradle Jesse is making for their baby, when they actually belong to Ira. She spends much of the second half of the book trying to get Fiona and Jesse back together, even though it is clear to the reader that Jesse no longer loves Fiona.

Answer: The Amateur Marriage

Pauline Barclay is the heroine and one of the main point-of-view characters in 'The Amateur Marriage'. She meets Michael Anton during the Second World War, when she injures her head jumping off a tram and she and her friends go to the grocery where Michael and his mother work. Pauline talks Michael into enlisting. They become a couple, much to the amazement of the local Polish community as Pauline is an outsider, but a sign of things to come occurs at their wedding when Pauline changes her mind. She and Michael do get married, but are constantly arguing, because Pauline is hot-blooded and impulsive, while Michael is stoic. She nearly cheats on him with Alex Barrow, a divorced man, but has second thoughts.

The disappearance of their oldest daughter Lindy causes even more strife in Pauline and Michael's marriage, and they eventually divorce, with Michael moving out for good. Both of them share custody of Pagan, Lindy's son. Michael remarries, while Pauline goes on dates - including with a widowed man who clearly misses his wife - none of which work out. Pauline dies in a car accident in 1987, and sadly never gets to see Lindy again.

Answer: Back When We Were Grown-Ups

Beatrice Allenby is Will's daughter with his ex-wife Laura, a former student of his. Rebecca expects her to be old-fashioned and conservative, with long hair and a muslin dress, but Beatrice is actually a goth girl with short hair and piercings. Will invites Rebecca to dinner so she can meet Beatrice, but the dinner is not a success; the meal Will cooks is disgusting and Beatrice tells Rebecca that she is only here because Will promised her an email account, and kidnapped the family dog when he was upset.

She does not stay for long.

Answer: Ladder of Years

Belle Flint is the owner of the boarding house where Delia stays when she comes to Bay Borough, until she moves in with the Millers. She is reluctant to take women boarders as the last one she had, Katie, was very demanding and eventually ran away to Hawaii with another boarder. Delia becomes friends with Belle and Belle introduces her to various local people in Bay Borough. She orders a Thanksgiving meal for a date and invites Delia and a few others, but he stands her up because he is getting back with his wife. Delia helps her with the meal and it goes ahead as planned. She also knows the Millers, and warns Delia not to let them treat her like a peon.

To Delia's surprise, Belle later gets engaged to Horace Lamb, the other boarder and a taciturn travelling salesman who sells storm windows, despite expressing little interest in him earlier in the book.

Answer: Saint Maybe

Rita DiCarlo is a friend of Daphne's who works as a 'clutter counsellor'; she helps people declutter their homes and get rid of unwanted things. When Agatha and Thomas come to visit the Bedloes after their grandmother Bee's death, Agatha is shocked at the state of the house and offers to pay Rita to sort it out. Rita meets Ian when he brings home a load of tiles he has picked up at work, and she tells him to get rid of them if he is not planning to use them. Rita later lets slip to Daphne that she and Ian are going out. Daphne warns Rita that Ian is religious, but Rita is not bothered as she herself is Christian.

After a service, Agatha asks Ian how much longer he will be on his own, and Ian announces that he and Rita are engaged. Rita becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby boy, Joshua; Ian builds a crib for him. She also joins the Church of the Second Chance and introduces the Bedloes to the Southern custom of eating black-eyed peas and rice on Christmas Eve for luck.

Answer: Breathing Lessons

Fiona Stuckey is the ex-wife of Jesse, Maggie and Ira's son. A woman calls into a phone-in to say that she is remarrying for security as her first marriage did not work out, and Maggie mistakes her for Fiona. Fiona was originally a fan of Jesse's band, Spin the Cat. When she got pregnant with Jesse's baby while in her teens, she was going to have an abortion, but Maggie talked her out of it. The couple continued to argue and split up after Ira told Fiona that Jesse was cheating on her. After Fiona and Jesse split up, Maggie kept driving over to Fiona's mum's house to spy on Leroy (Fiona's son).

Jesse barely has any contact with Leroy, to the point that when he visits her on her fifth birthday, he gives her a giant doll, showing how little he knows about her (as Leroy is a tomboy). Fiona and Leroy come over to Ira and Maggie's house after the funeral, and Maggie invites Jesse behind Fiona's back. When Jesse comes over, Ira reveals to Fiona that Jesse is sleeping with a greeter, and he and Maggie argue until Fiona tells them to stop. She and Leroy walk out; Maggie thinks she forgot her suitcase, but realises she and Leroy have gone for good when Fiona's purse and Leroy's beloved baseball mitt are missing.