title: Breathing Lessons
author:  Anne Tyler 
description: "Breathing Lessons" covers the events of a day in the life of Maggie Moran, nearing fifty, married to Ira and with two children. Her eternal optimism and her inexhaustible passion for sorting out other people's lives and willing them to fall in love is severely tested one hot summer day. Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick to attend the funeral of the husband of Serena, Maggie's childhood friend. During the course of the journey, with its several unexpected detours - into the lives of old friends and grown children - Anne Tyler shows us all there is to know about a marriage: the expectations; the disappointments; the way children can create storms in a family; the way the wife and husband can fall in love all over again; the way that everything - and nothing - changes.
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  # _Praise for Anne Tyler’s_  
  ![](images/Tyle_9780307761583_epub_L02_r1.jpg)  
  BREATHING LESSONS
  
  
  
  
  
  “Anne Tyler’s gentlest and most charming novel … an honest and lovely book.”
  
  
  _—Chicago Tribune_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Tyler’s best novel yet … with irresistibly funny passages you want to read
  out loud and poignant insights that illuminate the serious business of sharing
  lives in an unsettling world.”
  
  
  _—Publishers Weekly_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “A remarkable book … Tyler centers on that most fascinating of human
  institutions, marriage, and holds it to the light.”
  
  
  _—Baltimore Sun_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “So sharp is Anne Tyler’s eye and so inexhaustible the field of her
  observation, _Breathing Lessons_ shows us a writer who should have had trouble
  matching herself, surpassing herself.”
  
  
  _—The Washington Post_
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “Tyler’s touch is gentle but firm.… _Breathing Lessons_ fits naturally into
  the landscape of her work. Some readers may be reminded of _The B