"It was unnerving to be this girl's mother. She was so forthcoming. So frankly healthy and unfucked-up. How had she gotten this way? Ellen felt herself excluded from the process; she wasn't so healthy herself, still vaguely anorexic, still drinking too much and smoking occasionally, lying to her husband about her affections. She kept secrets - not in drawers or closets or diaries, but in her heart, behind her eyes, on her lips. Tracy's admirable openness seemed not to have been inherited from Ellen, so it must have come from her father."
