“Those words hit me like a truck: real family. They brought me back to a day when I was a kid and I had asked Peggy what the word bastard meant. She told me it mean 'illegitimate, like not real.' It has seemed like a toothless insult. But now I understood where the word had bite: if you are not real, you can be dismissed, erased, forgotten. It means the you don't matter.”
Book:Bastards: A Memoir