Robert calmly told his wife, Nancy, that if Gerhard, his male lover and draughtsman, abandoned him, he would commit suicide.

Nancy told me this when I was a teenager. No one ever told her that children were supposed to be protected from the cruelties of life in order to have some optimism and hope for the future.

It was an idea that she was incapable of forming on her own.

There was no FUN in our dysfunctional family.

Neither humor nor love or compassion touched us.