The Pursuit of True Happiness Anne Tyler has said that she uses the family unit to show "how people manage to endure together-how they grate against each other, adjust, intrude, and protect themselves from intrusions, give up, and start all over again in the morning," (Applebee et al...

All societies possess social standards that control the sequence and the tempo of important life occurrences. Frank Furstenberg in, Unplanned Parenthood introduces this notion of social standards through what he terms the normative schedule. According to Furstenberg normative schedules are, "prescr...