When Larry and Anne met in college, Anne was a well-known (for those in the scene, anyway) beauty queen in San Antonio. She had moved to Austin, Texas to pursue college dreams and spread her glitzy wings and in the process she found herself enarmoured with a man who was equally as taken by her. Larry didn't care if she'd won two pageants in 1984 while bogged down with the common cold as a nod to the breadth of her ability to succeed. Anne was beautiful, didn't drink and was religious on all good public holidays and that was about the true extent of his bar for women. Larry was an unassuming man whose only goals in life were to make sure his parents were proud of him, that they liked the company he kept and that his future job allowed for him to have weekends off. Within a year of graduating college, the pair married in a small ceremony and shortly after that they welcomed their first child, Elle. After giving birth to her first child, Anne became self-conscious of her body and was concerned she wasn't "quality" enough for pageants. No one could deny, however that Carissa was a beautiful baby and so Anne began to research into child pageantry. It was a hobby that became all-consuming, but Larry wasn't particularly bothered as long as Anne was happy. He was the one to take Carissa on outdoor excursions and begin the family boardgame night tradition with, it only made sense that Anne should have her own thing to occupy her time. She quickly found that child pageantry was far more interesting and easier to get into than what she had been doing prior. By the time Suzy was born, Elle had become a multi-title winning child and Anne could scarcely resist the lure that came with having two beautiful children competing.

Suzy, for all intents and purposes was spiritually the complete opposite of a pageant child. A tomboy at heart, she grew up knowing not to act out at pageants because winning meant money, and money meant new gym clothes and baseball gear. When she was six years old, Larry passed away from a severe case of food poisoning. He was the kind of man who avoided the ER until the last possible moment, and unfortunately in that particular moment he also became a statistic and a cautionary tale. The man who held together the household with game nights, joke photos of the girls holding his beer cans and gardening on Sunday mornings was gone and in his place Anne spiraled out of control. Success became key, the girls were enrolled in a multitude of sports (dance, gymnastics, synchronized swimming) alongside glitz pageants and forced to become winners. Anne had developed a psychological disorder, but rather than have it treated she pulled her children in with her.

The girls had a pact, once each of them turned eighteen they would get out. Elle left first, leaving Suzy in a household surrounded by portraits of the pair of them airbrushed, tanned and in their crowns. There were many fights over many nights between mother and daughter revolving around Anne's pure disdain for any photos of the girls where they weren't in their pageant gears. Suzy began to develop a complex, thinking that perhaps she did need to seek the approval of others if her mother wouldn't even have a regular photograph of her in the house. She graduated high school, and as soon as she turned eighteen she was gone from San Antonio and moving to Boston as far from their mother as she could humanly be bothered going. One of the side effects of her pageant years, Suzy became interested in philanthropy and enrolled in BU to study anthropology. An "arts" degree, useless in her mother's eyes, but worth the world to Suzy. She took up a job teaching gymnastics to preschoolers on the side and attempted to push her Texan accent into the background, to start fresh.