Because she saw them as little versions of her earlier self, discipline was a way of negating that person. With goodwill, she adopted children in order to save them from a childhood like her own. But she so resented that childhood that she tried to erase its signs and symbols. The discipline, in other words, was a way of preventing her own children from becoming distorted versions and repetitions of Joan Crawford. But the forms of thediscipline were not, it seems almost certainly, the hideously
