“She was constantly rebelling against the restraints and privations that she inflicted upon herself.

Her love for us was deep as well as exclusive, and the pain it caused us as we submitted to it was a reflection of her own conflicts. She was very open to wounds and her diffused indwelling resentment made itself apparent in aggressive forms of behaviour - brutal frankness, heavily ironic remarks. With regards to us, she often displayed. cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself.

Thinking against oneself often bears fruit; but with my mother it was another question again - she lived against herself. She had appetites in plenty: she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger. In her childhood her body, her heart and her mind had been squeezed into an armour of principles and prohibitions. She had been taught to pull the laces hard and tight herself. A full-blooded, spirited woman lived on inside her, but a stranger to herself, deformed and mutilated.”

- Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death