I know they didn’t give you a chance. I know what my mother is like and what she’s capable of doing to get her own way.

She hated being the child of a single mother—the only such among her friends when she was growing up. She could never shake her feelings of shame for her fatherlessness. Equally lasting was her hostility toward anyone her mother dated. Though she would never marry, my friend had affairs with several men while her daughter was growing up, and with every one of them the girl had behaved as rudely as possible. It would not be unfair to say that she helped drive some away.

She hated growing up in her grandparents’ house as if she and her mother were siblings. (To be honest, said my friend, I left a lot of the child rearing to my mother, which was how Mom wanted it too, and I really did feel more like an older sister than like a mother myself.) The daughter could not tolerate seeing how well mother and grandparents got along. She was an alien among them, her father’s daughter, not like any of her mother’s people, with whom she could not get along at all.

I will never forgive that woman for coming between us.

That woman of course being me, my friend said.

Love letters was what they were.

She had managed to turn him into a great passion, my friend said. She would’ve sold the rest of us into bondage to spend one hour with him.

And that’s what bothers me most, she said. Okay, hate me. I’m the one who got knocked up and said no to a shotgun marriage, I’m the terrible mother. But what about my parents? All they ever did was love and take care of her, and she made what should have been their golden years miserable. That’s what I’ll never forgive.

If she’d known how things would turn out, she’d have tried to give them another grandchild.

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

In middle school, she wrote a poem about her father that included the lines “I was the one in the burning house / I was the one you heard screaming.”

All about what a tragedy her whole life was, her mother described it. This much-loved, much-wanted child who grew up with every conceivable privilege in a world full of suffering, and here she is, acting like she’s an orphan, a refugee, a goddamn boat person. She even had the nerve to call herself that.

“I am an emotional boat person” was another line from the poem.

Her grandparents had also been upset by the poem, in which they were accused of being unfeeling rich snobs, more enemies than loving family.

It was the last fucking straw, my friend said. And then the school went and gave it a prize!