Breathing Lessons

Maggie is harum-scarum, impetuous, soft; Ira is competent, patient, infallible. They have been married for twenty-eight years.

One a hot summer day, they are driving to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, ninety miles from their home in Baltimore, to the funeral of Maggie's best friend's husband. And during the course of that journey, with its several unexpected detours — into the lives of old friends and grown children, into memories of the past and attempts to rearrange the present — 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 that wife and husband can fall in love all over again, the way that everything — and nothing — changes.