November 2, 2021:

Her relationship with The Beatles was mediated through my relationship with The Beatles. In practice this meant she had no real relationship with them, only an imaginary one, as she had no real relationship with me.

More precisely, her relationship with The Beatles was mediated through her relationship with television. Like me, life was not fully real to her. It was television which occupied her imagination and her consciousness, so that whatever appearance television presented was more substantial to her than her non-imaginary experiences. Thus in her mind The Monkeys were primary, The Beatles copied them, and any elements of seriousness — the influence for example of musique concrète on The Beatles' middle period — was eclipsed by the prior presence of cute.

It was very late in life — after her death, in fact — before I realized how truly damaged she'd been by the abuse she'd suffered in childhood. Her adult mental life of television, science fiction, and fantasy novels was "merely" an enlargement of her years locked in closets, alone, fantasizing other worlds. In hindsight her relationships with television, and The Beatles, and through them with her child, were all "merely" artifacts.