Richard Dawkins - let's not forget Richard Dawkins. He was naive and got a kicking for speaking out against the God delusion but he is my favourite. I read his book The Selfish Gene when I was exiting and I literally cried when I realised the book was ending and I would lose his company!
It sounds like your parents were not a good match. As a young woman, my mother fell in love with an air pilot. He was killed in action so that was that. My grandfather had started a business making heating equipment during the war and so several years later there she was at 26 years old on a boat going to Canada for a trade fair and she fell into the charm trap of a narcissist. From his perspective it was a good marriage, she stuck by him for 56 years, from hers it sure wasn't and though it took her so long to see through his lies, in her 80's she left him. I'm so proud of her, I still love her to bits even though she's been dead for just about 13 years now.
I've watched parent's heartbreaking struggles with manipulative children but it is not the same dislocating all-encompassing distress as in the marital relationship, and isn't the God delusion grafted onto the same spot.
This is why I have held onto the idea that the truth of Marolyn could be that she is number one victim of Rawat rather than being cut from the same cloth as him, which is looking more likely to actually be the truth of her.
