Alex Gynnild

“Later, we would wonder aloud whether my mother had planned for years to make her spectacular break with the past or had operated with a freestyle genius and seized the opportunity as events unfolded around her. We had long suspected that she was a brilliant woman, but it was only Savannah who was not surprised that my mother would prove to be a bold and unscrupulous one. She never apologized and never explained. She did what she was born to do, and my mother was never one to indulge in sudden flights of honesty or self-examination. With an impressive command of tactics, she proved herself the designated terrorist of beauty, the queen of the bloodless auto-da-fé, and, in the process, she ate Henry Wingo alive. But the price she paid was high. In her hour of greatest triumph, when all honors and kudos and riches had accrued to her at last, when she had proven to all that we had underestimated her value and importance, my father went to prison in a last grand gesture to win her admiration and they brought my mother the head of her oldest son on a plate. It would be my mother’s destiny to know the dust, and not the savor, of answered prayers.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides