One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden. I was a precocious four-year-old when I realized that my parents were locked in a contest to inflict as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the line into fatality—just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement that only rage could bring. It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the
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