Work dogs and show dogs/ moms and daughters--Franzen's Freedom

I finally finished this 563 pp behemoth and the last 100 pp or so are excellent, including this paragraph:

Her mainstay, of course, is Jessica. So much so, indeed, that Patty is rigorously careful not to overdo it and drown her with need. Jessica is a working dog, not a show dog like Joey, and once Patty had left Richard and regained a degree of moral respectability, Jessica had made a project of fixing up her mother's life. Many of her suggestions were fairly obvious, but Patty in her gratitude and contrition meekly presented progress reports at their regular Monday-evening dinners. Although she knew a lot more about life than Jessica did, she'd also made a lot more mistakes. It cost her very little to let her daughter feel important and useful, and their discussions did lead directly to her current employment. Once she was back on her feet again, she was able to offer Jessica support in return, but she had to be very careful about this, too. When she read one of Jessica's overly poetic blog entries, full of easily improvable sentences, the only thing she allowed herself to say was "Great post!" When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who'd dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica's belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty's age. And when Jessica's heart was then broken, slowly but thoroughly, Patty had to manufacture shock at the singular unforeseeable outrage of it. Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation — the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding — but mostly because she depends on Jessica's love now and would do just about anything to keep her in her life.