JOI’s life and the founding of E.T.A. (p. 64)

The family's origin as calculation, delivered in one flat sentence. Avril's Québecois-Separatist associations had landed her on the R.C.M.P.'s surveillance list and snarled her visa and Green Card process, and into that bureaucratic bind the firstborn arrives: Orin's conception was "at least partly a legal maneuver," a child produced to solve an immigration problem. The eldest son — later the family's most violently estranged member, the seducer of mothers, the one who blames Avril for everything — enters the world as a strategic instrument, his very existence a move in a paperwork game. The family that will run so much on managed appearances is founded on a birth that was itself partly a tactic, the first Incandenza child engendered as much for the state's files as for itself.