Back in the 1960s the psychologist R.D. Laing announced that the family was a machine designed to inflict insanity. After all, accusations and self-exculpation frequently seem the essential mode of familial communication.
With all the shouting and breast-beating, the rants and the weeping, parents and children are actors in a low-cost version of Eugene O'Neill's drama of domestic unhappiness, "Long Day's Journey into Night".
No knowledge of R.D. Laing's pronouncement or Eugene O'Neill's drama but mere instinct made me escape my parental home in the early 1960s - and I've never looked back. Did I finish up better, smarter, richer than my parents? Maybe, but I settle for having wanted to be merely happier.
