““It had never been a secret that I'd idealized my father, that I would've done anything to please him--to be the apple of his eye (to use the worst and most obvious cliché)--but what I didn't quite get until the painting was the sadness of all that trying. I hadn't understood the small, powerless places it had taken me. But even more than this, I had never completely realized how this same thing had gone on with Hugh. I'd accommodated myself to him for twenty years without any real idea of what it was to have possession of my own self. To own myself, so to speak.””
