From the "I am not alone" department: A profile called Inheritance by Ian Parker, about Edward St. Aubyn, in the New Yorker.
As everyone who knows me knows, my mother suffered from mental ill health and paralysis. She would tell lies about me to get my father to punch me and my Dad's punishment sometimes got out of hand. It scarred me.
In the New Yorker Article (June 2, 2014; page 45) Parker describes a scene wherein Patrick (a fictional but heavily autobiographical version of St. Aubyn), at age three, is picked up by his father and thrown into a swimming pool. Patrick struggles to make it to safety at the edge of the pool and sees his father "in his dark glasses smoking a cigar, angled away from [him], a jaundiced cloud of pastis on the table in front of him." St. Aubyn writes:
"The deeper truth that he has been a toy in the sadomasochistic relationship between his parents was not, until now, something he could bear to contemplate."
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