My mother eloquently captured the incongruous nature of her marriage to my father with a powerfully mundane anecdote: her own mother, dirt-poor Irish immigrant though she was, offered her every penny of her paltry life savings to not marry my dad.  For my maternal grandmother, an ever-suffering Catholic from the land of perpetual potato blight and British oppression, it was unthinkable that her only daughter—shy, studious, virginal, and still living at home at the age of thirty—would choose to let herself be physically and spiritually defiled by a man who could most politely be described as White Trash…

Read the rest in Gloom Cupboard…