Probably because of a combination of my parents’ heavy smoking and horrible fighting, I was hospitalized with pneumonia for several weeks at age three; back then family didn’t stay at the hospital, so I was alone and scared. My parents divorced when I was four, after which my mother became severely depressed. After two years of misery and shock treatments, she ended her life. My older sister and I then moved to a new city (in fact, I moved every year until age ten) to live with my father and his new wife. The stepmother hated children, especially the kids of her husband’s dead ex-wife, and she reacted with calculated and extreme cruelty. Not long afterward, my sister suffered a major psychiatric breakdown, and for some weeks it fell to me to guard her against her own delusions and hallucinations. My father was both a workaholic and an alcoholic; he was either gone at work, gone out drinking, or home but still gone in a drunken haze my whole childhood. The bright spot in my upbringing, and the reason I turned out more or less OK, was that I spent summers thousands of miles away from my father’s house. Half of each summer I spent at a nice camp, and the other half with a variety of nice relatives. But this was not enough to counterbalance the underlying message that I was unwanted and a burden.