The plateau that goes unseen.

As you might expect from Lynn, she doesn't really take well to being criticized by anyone for any reason because the template in her head is her messed-up relationship with her mother. Katie faithfully paints a portrait of a woman who didn't think that discussing feelings was done because that way lay madness and ruin and believed Lynn was strong enough and on the ball enough to think that her "you tried to please me but you did x, y and z wrong" isn't the tearing her apart because she hates her that an oddly lachrymose Lindy said it HAD to be. While Katie and Lynn assume that her shortcoming was that she didn't know how to deal with children, it's sort of obvious that Mrs Ridgway simply did what a lot of people do when something doesn't work and did it harder because she wasn't able to ask herself why she believed the things she did.

This, I should think, is why she insists on denying that we could ever have been fans of the strip because of her assumption that if we ever liked anything, she'd get the praise she so blatantly hungers for. As I've said before, she simply doesn't seem to want to admit that we all loved the Pattersons at one point only to become disappointed with their antics pretty much the same time she wrote that letter to Phyllis Diller that isn't mentioned in which she confessed that since the idol she sought to please had passed, she was just sort of phoning it in. This is when it stopped being "the story of a family like our own" and started to become an exercise in protagonist-centered morality and whooping about the baleful threats straw women and paper tigers represented. Given who she is, she can't help but confuse nostalgia with a need to destroy her and laugh at her.