At My Sister’s $5 Million Wedding, My Father Poured Wine Down My Dress and Called Me a Pathetic Spinster on the Microphone. I Made One Phone Call

It had been filling up, quietly, for years.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the machinery of the scapegoat, because I lived inside it so long that I could not see its shape until I was clear of it.

A family like mine does not choose its failure at random, and it does not choose her because she is actually failing.

It chooses her because it needs somewhere to put everything it cannot admit about itself.

My parents were frightened people — frightened of slipping, frightened of being ordinary, frightened, above all, of any evidence that their gleaming life was not as solid as they insisted.