Marlon Bain's letters to Steeply — "I saw parent after unimpeachable parent…"
I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) borderline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a)… (g).
Context
Bain's taxonomy of what unimpeachably loving, "technically stellar" parenting produces: chronic depression and borderline psychosis filed as items (c) and (d) in an eight-way menu of damaged children — the theme reduced to a lettered list, which is itself the joke and the horror.