How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
But my reason for being here embarrasses them, they don't understand it. They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to: Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs. (2.6)
Apparently, the narrator's peers consider it odd that she would come back to look for her missing father and hadn't "disowned" him. That attitude itself seems odder, no? Since when is disowning your parents is a rite of passage into adulthood?
Quote #2
If he's safe I don't want to see him. There's no point, they never forgave me, they didn't understand the divorce; I don't think they even understood the marriage, which wasn't surprising since I didn't understand it myself. What upset them was the way I did it, so suddenly, and then running off and leaving my husband and child, my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing. Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn't really mine. (3.20)
Oomph, drama. It appears that the narrator doesn't exactly have the simplest of relationships with her parents, since they didn't approve of her life choices with respect to the husband or kid. Of course, we later learn that the husband-kid thing didn't happen at all, so we don't really know how much of the truth the parents got and were reacting to.
Quote #3
But I couldn't have brought the child here. I never identified it as mine; I didn't name it before it was born even, the way you're supposed to. It was my husband's, he imposed it on me, all the time it was growing in me I felt like an incubator. (4.6)
The narrator does not have a warm and fuzzy view of the "miracle" of life, envisioning her pregnant self as a kind of incubator and referring to the baby as "it." Of course, her lack of connection with her "child" and pregnancy likely stems from the fact that she never actually carried that pregnancy to term (her memories here are faulty, as we learn later).