What piece of art changed your life? How did it affect you?

Eudora Welty's short story, "The Wide Net"--and more specifically, the sentence describing someone who could sit all day pondering how the tail of the C got through the loop of the L in the Coca-Cola sign. That sentence came at me like a burst of light. It made me see that I could write about ordinary life rather than something grand and operatic.

Anne Tyler's new novel, Noah's Compass, will be published by Knopf on January 5th. An exclusive excerpt appears in the December issue of Baltimore. You can read it here.