parental "it's complicated"

I'm reading Lev Grossman's "Magicians" trilogy, and on page 28 of the first book is this excellent sentence:

He would have to explain to his parents what happened, and they would, in some way he could never grasp, and therefore could never properly rebut, make him feel like it was his fault.

I'm 65 years old. My mother has mild-to-moderate dementia (we're pretty sure that she can't remember TEW's name); my father has been dead for years. Despite that, the sentence above spoke to me enough that I had to log into Blogger from a work computer and create this post.

I'll read the whole rest of the thing, and the next two books, even if it's nothing but industrial-quality suckage, just on the strength of that sentence.

Edit 8/4/20: I finished the trilogy. It was definitely not world-class suckage.