Anne Tyler's latest opus is entitled Digging to America.  We dig it.  Read our exclusive interview with this legendary living author below...

Contributing editor Larry Shapiro's rare and exclusive interview with Anne Tyler...

1. Was there a point in your career when you consciously decided that your subject was families?

Not only did I never consciously decide to make families my subject; I'm always hoping that they won't be my subject the next time around. It seems to me I've done families to death. But they just come to my mind, somehow. I think it's because they offer a convenient way of trapping my characters together at close quarters. Family life is like one of those cataclysmic disasters in a Grade B movie; it forces people to show their true selves.

2. DIGGING TO AMERICA has a feeling of inevitability about it, even though it's full of unpredictable twists and turns-unpredictable at least to this reader. In your first scene, where the two families are waiting at the airport to receive their adopted children, you introduce almost every major character but one. Did you plan it all out, from that first coincidental meeting to that wonderful scene-I don't want to give too much away-at the end?

This has been a very accidental novel. I did now the bare bones of the plot-how things would turn out in the end-but my characters were fairly willful, and they meandered toward that end in their own ways. That has probably been the greatest change to my approach to writing, over the years: more and more I've learned to trust my characters. I used to look forward to handling something-some scene or event that would be under my control-while now I look forward most to being surprised. It's as if someone else is telling me the story; who knows what will happen next?

3. When I think of your novels, I think of people sitting around a table for a festive occasion that takes an unexpected turn. It's striking how often the important action occurs during parties and meals and holiday celebrations. Is this a conscious preference?

Partly, of course, celebrations are just convenient opportunities for various kinds of social explosions. But I do notice that I seem drawn to scenes involving food, and I think that's because people's attitudes toward food reveal so much about the. Are they feeders, or withholders? Enjoyers, or self-deniers? What exactly is on their plates-or in the saucepans they're eating directly from as they're hunching over the stove? It's all a kind of shortcut to tell my readers whom they're dealing with.

4. In DIGGING TO AMERICA, this approach creates a "life's most awkward moment" impact when Maryam, who's been widowed for years and is elegant but reserved, receives a marriage proposal in front of everyone at a gathering. Did you consider having the proposal come in a more traditional way?

Maryam's public proposal was in my head from the start, because I'm fascinated by examples I've seen in real life-on billboards, on ballpark scoreboards-and I've wondered what a woman would do if she would rather not get married. The format for Maryam's proposal-the cultural misinterpretation involved-is an instance of my characters' running away with the book. It popped up out of nowhere, her suitor's own piece of silliness, but I left it in because it seemed appropriate to the theme.

5. Maryam is one of your most "exotic" characters, in that she came to America as a bride in an arranged marriage, from an Iranian society that was very different. Does your title refer to her as well as the children?

The story started with an image of two orphans arriving at an airport. Then I thought it would be fun if one of the families meeting them was Iranian, because I'd been thinking back fondly on the gigantic Iranian family I married into forty-odd years ago. Only halfway through the book did it occur to me that of course, Maryam too was "digging to America." Another lucky accident.

6. DIGGING TO AMERICA is a novel about friendship as well as families. In this case, it's accidental friendship, all stemming from that meeting at the airport in the first scene. Apart from adopting Korean babies, your friends don't appear to have much in common. What holds the friendship together?

I'll bet just about any young parent will agree with me that there is a time in life when friendships are dictated by one's children-how old they are, where they go to school. I've made some of the unlikeliest friends just because their children and mine developed a mania for, say, gymnastics at the same instant. And the Donaldsons and the Yazdans have even more reason for connection because of their shared experiences of infertility and adoption. They may, of course, drift apart later as their daughters grow up and move away; but it's also possible that by then they'll be so intertwined, they won't even see that as an option.

7. In some of your novels, the heartbreak comes from people who leave, especially children or siblings. You show this from the viewpoint of the people who are left behind and spend years brooding about what went wrong. Often when they do return-I'm thinking of SEARCHING FOR CALEB, where a long lost brother returns, and THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE, where it's a child-they seem very different from the way they were remembered. Is there a division between people who believe that family is the strongest bond there is, and people who don't seem to feel it much at all-or is that just the way it seems to the characters who have been abandoned?

I've never thought about this till you asked, but yes, it does seem you could divide the world into people who consider family paramount and people who do not. I don't want to say that one group is right and one is wrong, though. I'm sure there are many cases when leaving one's family is a matter of pure self-preservation.

8. My questions might make DIGGING TO AMERICA sound grim to someone who hasn't read it, yet it's certainly as funny and heartwarming as your other novels. How do you achieve that unique balance between humor and the graver emotions?

I've always been blessed-or cursed, you might say, if I'm sitting in a funeral-with a tendency to see the humor in sad events. And the sadness in humorous events, for that matter. (I'm the one asking, at the end of a joke, "But wait, didn't that hurt the man's feelings?") I like the underside of things. I don't plan that in my novels, but it can't help emerging. 9. Your novels must make great reading for introverts, because the reader gets to look on at so many parties without actually being there. Are you yourself a party person?

Heavens, no, I flatly refuse to go to parties, and even to ordinary meals if there will be more than four or five at the table. This is the great advantage of being a writer-you get to attend only on paper, and leave whenever you like.

10. A lot of readers found their way to your books after seeing THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST. Are any of your books in development as a movie?

Others have been made into movies, either for the theater or TV-Breathing Lessons, Earthly Possessions, A Slipping Down Life, Saint Maybe-and I believe a few more are under options. But I don't know very much about that side of things.

11. If you were a character in a novel, whom would you choose to write you?

What an intriguing question! I guess I would choose Eudora Welty, because she viewed her characters with such affection and kindness. I know she would be tactful about my foibles.

12. Have there been female protagonists-or for that matter, male protagonists-with whom you've identified?

Because I look at writing as a chance to live lives completely different from my own, I have never chosen a protagonist that I identified with. At least not at the start. One of the best of story's surprises is that I always do come to identify, or at least to sympathize, to some degree with my protagonist by the end. The protagonist I most wish I were like is Justine Peck in Searching for Caleb. She was so outgoing and so reckless, and being Justine for a while was so much fun!

13. I'm guessing you're a Jane Austen fan. Who else among the classics do you return to for pleasure and inspiration?

I worship Jane Austen, whom I came to relatively late in life. (I don't think I managed to make it through one of her novels until I was 35 or so, and then I devoured all of them.) And I have read Anna Karenina over and over, and felt awed every time by its freshness and its immediacy. But the classics in general are not books I return to. Dickens, for instance, wears me out! I want to read prose that's more selective.

14. Who among the newer writers gives you special pleasure?

Almost all of my reading is whatever has recently come out. I am very impressed with the new generation of young writers, who seem to be beginning at a much higher level than my own generation. And then I have my longtime favorite authors, of course. I just finished Robb Forman Dew's new book, The Truth of the Matter, which I loved, and I'm now reading Philip Roth's Everyman and finding it both touching and absorbing.