" Even to my mother, her hard-won autonomy must at times have resembled a cage. Still, it was a cage of her own design, different from and superior to the one my father, and her parents, and Gloversville itself, would have put her in, if she'd allowed them to. In retrospect, what astonishes me is the courage she must have summoned in order to imagine, by working in Schenectady, by having her own checking account, by going out on the occasional date, that she was outside the cage she was so clearly trapped in. "

― Richard Russo , Elsewhere