This is not a technicality. It is the central fact of his upbringing. Ethel May raised him. June, who bore him, lived in the same household for some years and remained in contact throughout her life, but she did not raise him in the sense that the word is ordinarily meant. She was the young woman in the house, the one who had talent and ambition and who eventually moved to California in pursuit of both. She was the one he knew as his sister.
When he learned, at thirty-seven, that June was his biological mother, the learning did not erase what had been there before. It did not retroactively make Ethel less of a mother or June less of a sister. It added a layer to the understanding he had of a household that had already been fully experienced. The names changed. The relationships they described did not.
He said, in one of the most quoted formulations from his interviews on the subject, that the revelation made things clearer. It is worth taking that seriously rather than treating it as a performance of equanimity. What did it make clearer? Perhaps the dynamics of a household where a young woman’s relationship to the child she had borne had to be managed carefully, performed through a sustained fiction, held in place across years and across the knowledge of various relatives. Perhaps the quality of attention that both women had given him — attention that, with the new information, could be understood as having different valences for each of them. Perhaps simply the answer to questions he had not known he was asking.