2 Quotes by Mary Anna King

Those words hit me like a truck: real family. They brought me back to a day when I was a kid and I had asked Peggy what the word bastard meant. She told me it mean 'illegitimate, like not real.' It has seemed like a toothless insult. But now I understood where the word had bite: if you are not real, you can be dismissed, erased, forgotten. It means the you don't matter.

The look on her father's face touched something primal in me. He didn't seem to like me, so I decided I didn't like him right back. It was a response that had been grafted onto my bones as a child: that weak people get hurt and strong people get even.