In Cold Blood

Perry's mother was an alcoholic. She did her best to poison her children's minds against their father, and she later abandoned them to group homes.

When Perry said, "I think there must be something wrong with us," he was making an admission he "hated to make." After all, it was "painful" to imagine that one might be "not just right" - particularly if whatever was wrong was not your own fault but "maybe a thing you were born with." Look at his family! Look at what had happened there! His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled to death on her own vomit. Of her children, two sons and two daughters, only the younger girl, Barbara, had entered ordinary life, married, begun raising a family. Fern, the other daughter, jumped out of a window of a San Francisco hotel. (Perry had ever since "tried to believe she slipped," for he'd loved Fern. She was "such a sweet person," so "artistic," a "terrific" dancer, and she could sing, too. "If she'd ever had any luck at all, with her looks and all, she could
have got somewhere, been somebody" It was sad to think of her climbing over a window sill and falling fifteen floors.) And there was Jimmy, the older boy - Jimmy, who had one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next.