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303 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 1982
1. The effects of a father’s abandonment of his family. Beck Tull, because of some flimsy personal reasons, abandons his family that includes his three kids, Cody, Jenny and Ezra. Underneath their life stories is the pain that they have to live through because their father just, without telling them so, stepped out of their lives at the time they needed him to be there.I am now reading her Pulitzer (1989)-award winning book Breathing Lessons and one thing that is very apparent is Tyler’s ability to make each of her book distinct and different from each other. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant has different POVs and the story is centered on a single family. The Accidental Tourist has only one POV, that of Macom Leary’s. Breathing Lessons opens with a couple who has two kids and at least judging from its opening, has a different taste compared to the first two books.
2. The difficulty of the remaining parent to try to make ends meet for the family. With Beck Tull gone, Pearl Tull, the mother has to support her 3 kids. This book shows that a mother, however loving she wants to be, can be neurotic and lose her temper because of the tall responsibility of raising her kids single-handedly. Mothers are human beings and they can do wrong. However, it is up to us to understand their shortcomings. Sometimes, however, some of us may not be as understanding as our siblings.
3. The passing of time, No matter how much painful our childhood was, we are now adults and we have our own lives to live: our own wife, children and grandchildren. We tend to do to them what our parents showed us. At the end of our life’s journey, however, it all boils down to the passing of time and this theme was brilliantly encapsulated in this paragraph (let me give you a sample of Tyler’s wonderful prose):
”Everything,” his father said, “comes down to time in the end- to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn’t it all based on minutes going by? Isn’t happiness expecting something time is going to bring you? Isn’t sadness wishing time back again? Even big things – even mourning a death: aren’t you really just wishing to have the time back when that person was alive? Or photos – ever notice old photographs? How wistful they make you feel? Long-ago people smiling, a child who would be an old lady now, a cat that died, a flowering plant that’s long since withered away and the pot itself broken or misplaced… Isn’t it just that time for once is stopped that makes you wistful? If only you could turn it back again, you think. If only you could change this or that, undo what you have done, if only you could roll the minutes the other way, for once.”