Take it from someone who knows — it’s the odd ones out in the family who have the best chance of winning at life. Unburdened by the gravitational pull of parental expectations or affection, the alleged weirdo is free to find her way to happiness by whatever means she sees fit.
There’s an entire wing of fiction built around such iconoclasts, but “The Other Bennet Sister” and its reimagining of Mary Bennet (Ella Bruccoleri, “Call the Midwife”) may be the most attuned to our times. Mary is a bookworm who draws her apt conclusions about human behavior from written wisdom. All she needs is a cat, and she would be the scourge of conservatives everywhere.
