QUOTE : One is formed by what one’s parents say and do; and one is formed by what one’s parents are. But what happens when what they say and do don’t match? My father, a man, advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother, a woman, did the same. So it was my mother who didn’t match, who didn’t make sense. We belong as much to our moment in history as to our parents: I suppose it would have been reprehensible in Britain in the late twentieth century, for her to have told us not to worry about our maths, that the important thing was to find a niche husband to support us. Yet her mother had probably told her precisely that. There was nothing as a woman, she could bequeath us; nothing to pass on from mother to daughter but these adulterated male values. And of that forsaken homeland, beauty, which now lay so despoiled—as the countryside around our Suffolk home as in the years of my growing up despoiled, disfigured by new roads and houses that it pained my oversensitive eyes to look at—of beauty, a woman’s beauty, of the place I had come from I knew nothing at all. I didn’t know its manners or its customs. I didn’t speak its language. In that world of femininity where I had the right to claim citizenship, I was an alien.