Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons (1988) offers a poignant exploration of the complexities and nuances of modern American family life.
Through the lens of a single day in the lives of Ira and Maggie Moran, Tyler unravels the intricate web of emotions, relationships, and unspoken tensions that define their long marriage.
The novel delves into the everyday experiences, disappointments, and small victories that shape the family unit, revealing the profound impact these moments have on individual identities and the collective bond of family.
With her signature blend of humor and empathy, Tyler presents a compelling portrait of the joys and challenges inherent in family life, making Breathing Lessons a timeless study of human connection.
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OVERVIEW
Breathing Lessons is Tyler’s 11th book. Winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as Time magazine’s Book of the Year, it is the story of the “run-of-the-mill marriage” of Ira and Maggie Moran.
The story explores the joys and tribulations of marriage as Maggie and Ira travel from Baltimore to a funeral in Pennsylvania and home again in one day.
SETTING
Ira runs a small family business in Baltimore while Maggie works as a geriatric nurse.
The novel appears to be set in the late 1970s or early 1980s. As the story begins, Ira is reflecting on the amount of waste in the world, including his own life. On this Saturday they are preparing to go to a funeral, and Maggie is picking up their car from the garage. As she drives home, Maggie hears a woman announcing her impending marriage on a radio phone-in, and becomes convinced that the bride-to-be is her former daughter-in-law, Fiona.
She collects Ira and they set out for the funeral in rural Pennsylvania. The novel then moves on to explore the intricacies of the Moran marriage, including an attempt by Ira and Maggie to help reconcile their ex-daughter-in-law with their son, Jesse.
The setting of the action is not a major focus of the book, and little detail is given regarding the characters’ physical surroundings.
Instead, it is their sensibilities and behaviour that reflect their station in life. Interspersed with the narrative are Ira and Maggie’s dealings with various minor characters on the road to the funeral and back: the waitress in whom Maggie confides about her family problems; the old black driver, Mr Otis, whom they help to reach a petrol station after his car breaks down; and, finally, their encounter with Leroy, their granddaughter, and her mother Fiona.
THEMES AND CHARACTERS
The main theme of Tyler’s novel is the modern American family, and it is primarily from the individual’s relationship with the family that his or her sense of identity is derived, Tyler reasons.
For Tyler, the family is both a positive and negative influence. In Breathing Lessons, the characters have individual interpretations of the concept of family that coincides with their understanding of their own identity. Ira feels trapped by his family: “his sisters’ hands dragged him down the way drowning victims drag down whoever tries to rescue them”.
This view extends from Ira’s perception of himself as someone whose dreams have been thwarted. One of those dreams is that a family is loving, loud, boisterous, and fun. Ira’s view of his own family as a trap is mirrored by his job as a picture framer.
For Ira, the image never changes and it never matches his envisaged ideal portrait.
Maggie’s idealized family is busy, exciting, and flexible: she believes that the family can be created with whomever she chooses to set up life. In her frenetic and endless family creating, she resembles a mother hen more worried about her extended brood than about herself. Maggie’s meddling in the affairs of Jesse and Fiona exposes her concern not so much with marriage, but with keeping her family together. Unlike Ira, Maggie does not give much thought to her own blood relations.
Thus, it is ironic that she cites the bloodline as her reason for stealing her granddaughter away from Mrs Stuckey, stating, “we’re Leroy’s grandparents till the day we die”.
Within the context of family, a recurring motif is the ideal marriage.
Everyone has a theory about marriage. Maggie’s friend Serena got married because it was the right time to do so. Maggie got married because she thought she had found her soul mate. Maggie’s son Jesse thinks of marriage as a bad habit, the “same old song and dance”.
As the novel points out, there are rituals and a repetitive pattern to marriage—“the same jokes and affectionate passwords”—and the same “abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations”.
The title of the novel metaphorically captures the answer to the question, according to Maggie and Ira.
Regular breathing, the giving and taking of breath, is life. Similarly, the life of marriage is full of giving and taking. During the novel’s one day, Maggie and Ira reveal the many layers of their 28 years together. They are constantly arguing and making up, remembering petty feuds and wondrous delights.
When they speak aloud they are not “bickering” but “compiling our two views of things”. Marriage is all about sharing the everyday experience of life with another person, and it is this aspect that most bothers the widowed Serena. As she tells Maggie over the phone, she is realizing that Max is not present for discussions about “what the plumbing’s up to, and how the red ants have come back in the kitchen”. When Maggie offers to discuss the mundane, Serena answers, “but they’re not your red ants too, don’t you see? I mean you and I are not in this together.”
Mr Otis and his wife, Duluth, present another view of marriage.
As their nephew Lamont describes it, their marriage consists of childish bickering. Mr Otis corrects him, insisting that his marriage with Duluth is full of life and passion. To Mr Otis, marriage should be something you can look back on fondly from the retirement home. Mr Otis says he will remember his partnership with Duluth as “a real knock-down, drag-out, heart-and-soul type of couple”.
Anything else would be dull and worthless, and liable to fall apart like Lamont’s marriage.
Tyler’s characters negotiate their lives and their relationships with one another in what the critic Alice Petry has described as “a messy chaotic world of happenstance”.
For Tyler, chance occurrences are what life is all about, and her characters deal with situations many readers will understand. The ways in which Tyler’s characters negotiate everyday life differ, giving rise to the humour and the tension of the novel.
The clearest example stems from a comparison of the Morans. Ira reacts with seriousness to the full house he has been dealt: crazy siblings, an “ailing” father, an incompetent son, and an introverted daughter. On the other hand, Maggie is playing games. As Ira reflects: And his wife! He loved her, but he couldn’t stand how she refused to take her own life seriously.
She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular—side trips, random detours.
LITERARY TECHNIQUE
Breathing Lessons employs a third-person omniscient narrator. The book is divided into three parts: the first and third sections reflect Maggie’s interpretation of events, while the second part of the book is told from Ira’s point of view.
The two viewpoints allow each character to provide his/her perspective on their lives and long marriage.
The novel can also be considered a “comedy of manners”, a work of literature that is witty and cerebral. In such works, the characters struggle to uphold appearances and social standards. The plot normally revolves around a sexual affair or another sort of scandal.
Like all comedies, the comedy of manners uses humour to convey a moral. Much of the comedy in Breathing Lessons develops from embarrassing situations that occur as a result of bad manners. For example, it is improper to sneak into your host’s bedroom and have sex there with your husband. It is especially improper to do so during a funeral dinner. Tyler pulls this off, in part because the reader will believe that Ira and Maggie have given up on sex.
The subtle touches are the key; Serena stares at Ira with “his open zipper and his shirttail flaring out”. Yet the scene does not simply end; Maggie tries to put a good face on it, and says, “Well, bye now!” to everyone.
Although Tyler’s narrative presents an overview of a long marriage, the action of the story takes place in the course of one day. The author manages to convey the depth and length of her characters’ lives via the use of numerous literary techniques, including the flashback.
This device allows Tyler to disrupt the chronology of the day with episodes of reminiscence on the parts of Maggie or Ira.
QUESTIONS
What is the role of game playing in the novel? How do games demonstrate the motif of breathing lessons or support Tyler’s larger themes?
The legal issues of child custody and parental access rights have become more complex in the United States in recent times. What rights have the courts awarded to grandparents? Discuss these issues in relation to Breathing Lessons.
Tyler’s novel returns to the topic of the care home repeatedly. Find out more about the quality of service provided by care homes in the United States and Britain in the late 1980s. How does it compare with the care given in today’s care homes? What does the placing of senior citizens in care homes say about the value our society places on the elderly, then or now?
In the 1980s, Harborplace was considered a triumph of urban revitalization. What is Harborplace like today? Do some research on the area. Has it exceeded the hopes of the city planners in Baltimore?
RELATED TITLES
Tyler continues to explore American lives and characters in her 1998 novel, A Patchwork Planet. In this work, Tyler relates the story of Barnaby Gaitlan, star employee of Baltimore’s Rent-a-Back, Inc.
At the age of 30, Barnaby is divorced and still not finished with college or free of a debt to his parents. He helps senior citizens sort out their attics and basements while they fend off attempts to put them in care homes. Another Tyler work that explores family life is Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), relating the history of the Tull family.
The Accidental Tourist (1985) concerns recently divorced travel writer Macon Leary, who hates travel. Macon moves home with his temperamental dog, Edward, and has a relationship with the dog’s trainer.
Breathing Lessons (1994)
Breathing Lessons (1994) is a television film adaptation of Anne Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Breathing Lessons (1988). The movie, produced by Hallmark Hall of Fame, stars James Garner as Ira Moran and Joanne Woodward as Maggie Moran, a married couple navigating the ups and downs of their relationship over the course of a single day.
Directed by John Erman, the film faithfully captures the essence of Tyler's novel, highlighting the small yet significant moments that define a long-term marriage. Woodward's performance earned her critical acclaim, including a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.
The film is noted for its heartfelt portrayal of the complexities of love, family, and the passage of time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Tyler, an author of short stories and novels, is known for her fiction exploring the vicissitudes of late 20th-century American life. Readers identify with Tyler’s characters and see their own experiences mirrored in her fiction—life, loss, family, death, and all aspects of the human condition.
Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her parents were members of the Society of Friends and liberal activists, and the family lived in a series of Quaker communes across the Midwest and southern United States.
Anne read voraciously as a child and began to write stories at the age of seven. When she was 11, the family moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she attended school for the first time. The alienation she experienced at this time became a recurring theme in her writing.
Tyler won an academic scholarship to attend Duke University, North Carolina, as a student of creative writing and Russian. At university, she twice received the Anne Flexner Award for creative writing and her short stories were published regularly. Tyler graduated from Duke after three years, aged 19, with a degree in Russian.
In 1961, after a year of postgraduate study at Columbia University, Tyler returned to Duke. There, she worked as a Russian language bibliographer until 1963. She then married and moved to Montreal, Canada, where her husband studied medicine. While in Montreal, she worked as an assistant librarian and wrote her first two novels, If Morning Ever Comes (1964) and The Tin Can Tree (1965). In 1967 Tyler and her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Once her children were at school, she began writing full time.
In 1970 she published A Slipping Down Life, followed by The Clock Winder in 1972. Her 1985 novel The Accidental Tourist was made into a film of the same name in 1988.