“She wanted to be in charge of where I was going to go to school, who my friends were going to be, what career I was going to have, whom I was going to marry, what I was going to wear, and what I was going to say. When I started to veer from her notions, it enraged her. She was mercurial, carnivorous, and boundary-disrespecting and thought of me as an extension of herself. My father was unable, or unwilling, or both, to protect me from her.”

