The Silver Linings Playbook

When Tiffany meets Pat, her husband Tom has been dead for two years. Tom was killed by a drunk driver and had left the house that day after Tiffany told him she wanted them to have sex less often. She blames herself for his passing, and after his death, Tiffany goes through a promiscuous, dangerous time when she has sex with any man who is willing. She has sex with strangers so that she can fantasize about Tom. This behavior eventually leads her to lose her job three weeks before meeting Pat. 

Tiffany is able to use Pat as a project to distract herself from her own feelings. If she can help him, it will assuage some of her guilt. After she falls in love with Pat, the depths of her own mental instability become clearer. Tiffany is generous and well-intentioned, but her methods—such as writing letters to Pat while pretending to be Nikki—are irrational and cause new and unnecessary problems. However, Tiffany is the only one who can accept Pat for who he is because she knows what it is like to have a mind that no one seems to understand.

Pat’s father is, for most of the novel, a gruff, unsympathetic character who ignores his son and is emotionally harsh with his wife. Pat watches the VHS tape of his wedding reception and remembers the strangeness of his father weeping: “The man who never showed any emotions other than anger was crying” (165). Pat is aware throughout the novel that when the Eagles lose, his mother will bear the brunt of his father’s anger. Patrick Senior is resentful of the financial and emotional burden that Pat’s return brings to their house. He makes a point of ignoring his son unless they are watching football together. As the novel progresses, it can be argued that Pat’s father does not ignore him out of cruelty or anger, but because he does not know how to help his son or how to talk about his own emotions. 

He tells Pat, “You need to make time for family no matter what happens in your life” (97), although he does not make time for his family. It is not until Jeanie makes her lists of demands that the extent to which Patrick isolates himself from the family is made clear. His anger issues, emotional issues, and reliance on the Eagles as a distraction from the rest of his life raise questions of his own history and mental health.

Pat’s mother Jeanie is a long-suffering woman who spends most of the novel enabling the bad behavior (or at least, unpredictable and self-centered) of Pat and his father. She is a meek woman who serves snacks and drinks without complaint while the boys watch football together, and she accepts her husband’s frequent, angry outbursts. Her temperament changes when her husband breaks the TV. She sees that she spends so much time taking care of her family that she does little for herself. 

When she becomes drinking friends with Tiffany and listens to herself talk about her problems, she realizes that she has not asked enough of the men in her life. When Jeanie draws the list of demands that her husband must abide by in order to save their marriage, it is a rare, unequivocal act of defiance that finally shows her husband that he has not always done right by her or their son. Jeanie is a symbol of unconditional, motherly love, but also of the emotional pitfalls that codependency can produce.