What is the importance of family dinners as noted in the memoir, The Years (Ernaux)?

Throughout The Years, Ernaux's invocation of the dinner table demonstrates its importance as a setting of familial life. She records nothing but positive associations with eating with family at the dinner table, both as a child and as a grown woman with her own kids to feed. The table becomes, through Ernaux's prose, a symbol of togetherness and communication, allowing for the breaking down of barriers and generational boundaries. Even little children are, during dessert, allowed to sit at the table and listen to the 'grown-ups' reminisce about their youths. The dinner table becomes the primary domestic setting through which parents and children interact and learn about one another, lending Ernaux's memories a sense of continuity between past and present dinners.