What Ethel May thought, across thirty-seven years of raising her grandson as her son. The beauty salon, the oil paintings, the formidable personality that Nicholson describes — these are attributes of a person, not a window into her interior life on this specific question.
What remains is the family that Jack Nicholson actually experienced. Whatever the biological reality, the people who raised him were the people who raised him. Ethel May, whatever her relationship to him in genetic terms, was his mother in the sense that matters for the formation of a person: she was present, she cared for him, she was the organizing force of the household that shaped him. June, whatever the biology, was his sister in the sense that he experienced her: as a slightly older woman in the orbit of his family, as someone he mourned when she died.
The discovery did not erase those experiences. It added information to them. The frame changed; the contents remained.
Nicholson himself has described something like this understanding in the various ways he has talked about the revelation across the years. He did not, after learning the truth, disavow the family he had experienced. He did not retroactively reject Ethel May as a fraud or June as a stranger. He adjusted his understanding — found a term like “sister-mother” to hold the complexity — and continued to acknowledge the household that had formed him as the household that had formed him.
The biological truth and the experienced truth are both true. They are true in different registers, about different aspects of what a family is and does. The biological truth is about genetic inheritance, about the chain of descent that connects a person to the larger human past. The experienced truth is about relationship, care, presence, and the specific texture of being raised by particular people in a particular place.