When Adora’s Munchausen came to light, last week, the suggestion was that Amma used the same tricks on her mom. What wasn’t necessarily obvious was that she wasn’t manipulating Adora in order to run wild with her friends; she was getting dangerously trashed and committing murder in order to keep a stranglehold on her mother’s care and attention. When Adora shifted her attention from her own compliant daughter to two incorrigible girls, Ann and then Natalie, Amma reinvented herself as both the perfect challenge and the perfect victim. That must have been what she meant when she told Camille, “I get funny ideas sometimes.” It’s certainly why she was so broken up when Adora got arrested, and so emotional while visiting her in jail.

Toward the end of Gillian Flynn’s book, which draws out its final twist for a bit longer than the show does, Camille meditates further on Amma’s motives. “You can come up with 4000 other guesses, of course, as to why Amma did it,” she muses. “In the end, the fact remains: Amma enjoyed hurting. I like violence, she’d shrieked at me.” Finally, Camille concludes, “I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”

But after hearing Adora’s story about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own mother, it seems safe to conclude that the blame reaches high into the branches of that particular family tree.

It’s always the family. And in this case, that family consists of a mother who can only show her love through causing pain, a daughter who succumbed to that fatal care and a daughter who learned to leverage her mom’s cruelty and her dead sister’s passivity into a sick, self-serving form of sadomasochism. Throw into that mix a father who, like the typical Wind Gap man, has convinced himself that child care is his wife’s domain, and you have the makings of a Gothic horror story — which is exactly what “Sharp Objects” becomes in the finale, when Camille narrowly avoids becoming the second daughter to die from Adora’s twisted ministrations.

Camille’s sacrifice, to save Amma and to find out once and for all whether Adora is poisoning her children, is heroic. It’s also the ultimate expression of the particular illness she acquired growing up in the Crellin household — and in Wind Gap, a town whose violent, sadomasochistic tendencies were shaped by Adora’s ancestors, the Calhouns. Instead of playing her mother’s game, by cutting into her own skin, Camille became both the attacker and the victim, both Adora and Marian. Unlike Amma, however, she only ever took out her aggression on herself.

Camille certainly has more in common with her mother and sisters than she would like, and while she may not share any of Alan’s DNA, she does seem to share some of his denial. Fighting for her life on Adora’s ivory floor, she has a strange vision that I believe is a flashback: There she is on that same floor with Marian, as a kid. It’s a room she would have only been allowed to enter while she was ill and being cared for by Adora. And just before the vision ends, young Camille’s eyes widen. In that moment, I think Camille is remembering something she had blocked out. On some level, hasn’t she always suspected that her mother caused Marian’s death?