Susan McGrory

“This much I’ll give the man: he didn’t lecture me about not living up to my potential. He’d got hold of my DSS records going back to the hospital interviews of Mom’s OD, or before. I’d had one foot in the custody-removal shitpile since birth. I told Mr. Armstrong if he’d read all that, he knew more about me than I did. He said no, he didn’t, that nobody ought to pretend to know how I felt. “Here’s what I do know,” he said. “You are resilient.” I’d heard quite a few fifty-dollar words for the problem of Demon. I asked Mr. Armstrong if he was wanting to put me on meds for that. “It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead