"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 …

…nature did not protest, leaving them both unhappy. Jenny, however, provided a glimmer of hope for the family and the generations that would follow. Her rocky road to love had strengthened her spirit and she proved a challenge for the destructive force of love. Despite this spark, however, hindsight revealed to Pearl Tull that her family [had] failed' (pg 190) -whether or not she was blind to the destructive force of love will remain a mystery.