Both my parents exacted severe punishment for lying and yet I knew, in time, that they lied to me and to each other and to others when, presumably, they felt the occasion warranted it.
And this was just part of the story. But hypocrisy about sex, about race relations, about religion, took me a longer time to see. I was out of high school before that picture began to pull together. Understanding didn't devastate me because I had begun to absorb the knowledge little by little, through the years. By the time I was 18 or 19 I guess I was both old enough to understand and strong enough to face what I saw. And we, my friends and I, did come to take it for granted. Parents were that way. Older people were that way. The word for what we found out about our parents'generation was hypocrisy. And most of us accepted it as part of life—as the way things were.