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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler

            "Love, in the world of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' is a destructive force.
             Love has the power to heal; however the experiences of the Tull family in Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant' demonstrate the destruction and pain that individuals can also encounter as a result of this force. .
             The novel's opening chapter focuses on Pearl Tull and the scars left by her failed marriage. In an effort to disprove her relatives' suggestions that she would be an old maid' (pg 4), she found herself almost running down the aisle with a man 6 years her junior. At the time she felt reckless and dashing' (pg 5) but a few years down the track and 3 children later, Pearl was a single mother with a part-time job and a depleting self-esteem. .
             After Beck left her, Pearl's determination (perhaps even stubbornness) willed her on, amidst the emotional debris; however things only got harder for the Tull family. The destruction that love had left behind affected her children and their futures just as much as it had hers. Jenny described her mother as a dangerous person -hot breathed and full of rage and unpredictable' (pg 71) and each of her children's accounts reveal physical and emotional abuse to some extent. .
             Pearl was very conscious of the way her family was viewed by others and throughout her life strived to create the appearance of a happy family' (pg 9). By the time of her death, she seemed to have accomplished this, with all of her children having successful careers and even managing to convince their father of the happy family' illusion. However memories of a disturbing childhood would remain in the minds of her children forever -and all in the name of love. .
             .
             Although all three children felt her stinging slap' (pg 71) on more than one occasion in their childhoods, Ezra was the child with which she made the strongest connection. He had always been the enduring, uncomplaining sort' (pg 77) but he too came up against the destructive force of love.


Essays Related to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler

1. Dinner at the homesick restaurant

When the family you live with makes you livid, depressed, or even just plain tired, you know it's true what they say, "You can't pick your family, but you have to learn to live with them " Even if that's true, the book, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler, certainly brings up things that make you wonder, "Do I really have to live with these people?" ... Anne Tyler also does a good job of pulling the reader into the plot, and it's almost like she's sharing her story with you. ... I just hope everyone gets the chance to read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ...

  • Word Count: 472
  • Approx Pages: 2
  • Grade Level: High School

2. Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler Well-known contemporary novelist and short story writer, Anne Tyler, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1941 to Lloyd, an industrial chemist, and Phyllis Tyler, a social worker. ... The children in the settlement received lessons in subjects such as art, carpentry, and cooking, but Anne Tyler also attended a local public school at Harvard. By the age of seven Tyler had already begun writing stories. ... Family life always took priority to Tyler's writing. ... In her 1982 novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the tension of the Tull family is seen from the vantage p...

  • Word Count: 834
  • Approx Pages: 3
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: Undergraduate

3. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler takes place mainly in Baltimore between 1924 to 1980. ... Scarlatti's Restaurant. ... Scarletti died she left the restaurant to him. ... He called it now the Homesick Restaurant because he thought it was a place where people could go to get meals that reminded them of back home, that they had not had in a while and missed. ... On important events of certain occasions Ezra always invited the family for dinner at the restaurant; however, they never once finished a meal because every dinner, something had gone wrong. ...

  • Word Count: 556
  • Approx Pages: 2
  • Has Bibliography
  • Grade Level: High School

4. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Pearl is the centerpiece of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; a novel which tells the story of her life through the eyes of the people she loved most, her children. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler, is a bittersweet novel which demonstrates how one mother's perfect intentions became just the opposite and turned what should have been an ideal family into a group of torn-apart adults who only have a vague idea of what a family should be. ... After he had graduated from high school, Ezra began working at a restaurant called Scarlotti's. ... She taught him how to "run"...

  • Word Count: 1740
  • Approx Pages: 7
  • Grade Level: High School

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