So, yes, I was happy amid the wildnesses of its adult lives, amid the travails of my siblings and the parental bizarreries which came to feel like everyday occurrences, and in a way still do, they still persuade me that it is the idea of the norm that is bizarre, the notion that human beings have normal, everyday lives... go behind the door of any household, I want to argue, and you’ll find a macabre wonderland as untamed as our own. And maybe I’m right; or maybe this attitude, too, is a part of my complaint, maybe this—what?—this fucked-up dissident mind-set, too, is all my mother’s fault.

Vasco had said it years ago: corruption was the only force we had that could defeat fanaticism.