Joelle cleans and remembers the Incandenzas — "Never trust a man on the…"
Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience. […] Though it’s not as if you could trust parents on the subject of their memory of their children either.
Context
Joelle's earned maxim, dropped into the cleaning-frame as free-standing doctrine, and one of the book's plainest statements about memory's built-in distortion: childhood memory is permanently shot from a child's height, arrested in proportion to its unhappiness — and the parents' version is no more trustworthy. It licenses every correction she goes on to make to Orin's account of Himself.