“Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” (post 4) by Anne Tyler: Multiple personality usually starts in childhood as a way to cope with trauma

Cody, the oldest son of the protagonist, Pearl Tull, says his mother was “a raving, shrieking, unpredictable witch. She slammed us against the wall and called us scum and vipers, said she wished us dead, shook us till our teeth rattled, screamed in our faces. We never knew from one day to the next, was she all right? Was she not? The tiniest thing could set her off. ‘I’m going to throw you through that window,’ she used to tell me. ‘I’ll look out that window and laugh at your brains splashed all over the pavement.’”

But Cody’s younger brother, Ezra, disagrees. He says their mother “wasn’t always angry. Really she was angry very seldom, only a few times, widely spaced, that happened to stick in your mind” (1, pp. 294-295).

Which brother’s memory is more credible? Ezra is the much more likable character, but had been a sleepwalker with memory gaps (see post 2).

1. Anne Tyler. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant [1982]. New York, Vintage Books, 2017.