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    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America"
    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America"
    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America"
    Ebook54 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535821902
    A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Anne Tyler's "Digging to America" - Gale

      12

      Digging to America

      Anne Tyler

      2004

      Introduction

      Digging to America, Anne Tyler's seventeenth novel, published in 2004, centers on two families who meet in 1997 in the Baltimore-Washington airport while awaiting the delivery of their adopted Korean daughters. The Donaldson-Dickinson clan arrives with great fanfare; grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, bearing balloons and video cameras and sporting large buttons proclaiming I'm a Grandma! and I'm a Mom! The Yazdans are a smaller group—Sami, his wife Ziba, and his mother Maryam—and they go almost unnoticed until their baby arrives and the Donaldson-Dickinsons realize there are two babies on the plane. Bitsy Donaldson tracks down Ziba Yazdan and a friendship ensues, cemented over the years by the ritual Bitsy invents, an Arrival Party, held each year on the anniversary of the day the girls arrived.

      The point of view of the novel alternates between the Yazdan and Donaldson-Dickinson clans, a device that demonstrates the different ways the two families handle their adoptions and the different customs they keep. The Yazdans are Iranian. Maryam immigrated in her early twenties, while Ziba's family, the Hakimis, came in the 1980s. Although the Yazdans are eager to downplay the double difference their daughter carries as a Korean-born child in an Iranian family in American society, the Donald-sons are just as eager to maintain their daughter's cultural markers. Over the course of the novel, we see how the girls' personalities develop as they grow and follow the course of friendship between the two families. It is a friendship that will be tested when the grandparents, Dave Dickinson and widowed Maryam Yazdan, begin dating after Dave's wife, Connie, dies, and it is in this way that the novel takes on not just issues of adoption but also those of immigration and assimilation and how these issues affect the personal identities of all parties concerned.

      Author Biography

      Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the eldest child of Lloyd and Phyllis Tyler. Her parents were Quakers, and the family, which came to include three younger brothers, moved several times in search of an intentional community (a planned, communal arrangement where several like-minded families live together cooperatively) before settling, in 1948, in the Celo Community in rural North Carolina. Tyler was home schooled until she was eleven, when the family moved to Raleigh, where she was enrolled in public school. In her essay Still Just Writing, Tyler notes of that transition, I had never used a telephone and could strike a match on the soles of my bare feet. The experience of finding the outside world peculiar, and being considered peculiar in turn, instilled in Tyler that sense of being an outsider that seems common to many writers. In the same essay, she notes, I have given up hope, by now, of ever losing my sense of distance; in fact, I have come to cherish it. Tyler completed high school at sixteen and got a scholarship to Duke University. There, she majored in Russian and studied creative writing with the novelist Reynolds Price.

      After college, Tyler moved to New York to complete a master's degree in Russian at Columbia University, and in 1963, she married Taghi Mohammed Modarressi, an Iranian medical student. They moved to Montreal so he could finish his residency and then to Baltimore in 1967, where Tyler has lived ever since. They had two daughters, Tezh,

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