“I don't really care for movies; they make everything seem so close up.”

Anne Tyler’s novel, about a buttoned-up writer of travel books surviving tragedy to discover some kind of liberation with a wacky dog trainer, filmed in the novelist’s own city of Baltimore, Maryland.

The house that scribbler Macon Leary (William Hurt) shares with Sarah Leary (Kathleen Turner), before their comfortable world is shattered, can be found in Tyler’s own middle-class neighbourhood of Roland Park. It’s at 324 Hawthorne Road, not far from the Baltimore Country Club.

A couple of blocks to the north, on the corner of Woodlawn Road and Wyndhurst Avenue, is the house of Macon Leary’s ditsy siblings he moves into after the collapse of his marriage. Downmarket, down-to-earth and way downtown is the terraced home of the dog trainer, Muriel Pritchett (Geena Davis), 501 21st Street at Greenmount Avenue.

Leary’s travels take him to Europe where he likes his meals fast, bland and international – at the (now gone) Yankee Delight on the Embankment by Westminster Bridge in London, and the Burger King (still there at the last check – holding the world record for Whopper sales) at 122 avenue des Champs Elysées between rue de Balzac and rue Washington in Paris.