In high school I had a boyfriend who was super into rap, so I was into Too $hort and Wu-Tang for a little while. And my best friend's older brother would sometimes drive us home in this pimped-out truck, and he'd play all his dirty rap music. We thou...
In 1985, I was living with my sister in Virginia, and since I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald's to save money to get an abortion. It sounds really terrible, but it was the best decision I ever made. It was the first time I took respons...
One day when I was like 9, I heard the Beatles on the radio, and I asked my dad who they were. He told me they were the best band in the world, and I became obsessed. He started giving me their albums in sequential order, and I listened to them - and...
Sometimes the person that is best for you is the person right under your nose. I wanted to have a girlfriend in high school, and I know I would have treated a girl well, but instead I was just friends with a lot of girls. They ended up telling me lat...
The best schools tend to have the best teachers, not to mention parents who supervise homework, so there is less need for self-organised learning. But where a child comes from a less supportive home environment, where there are family tensions perhap...
I was home-schooled and I graduated super-early. But I've always had older friends, so I got to go to all their dances. I got the best of both worlds. I had the choice to go to prom with a friend of mine and I decided not to because I was filming ver...
My parents spent an awful lot of money sending me to the best possible schools, and I came out of my exams and thought, 'I don't really want to do a degree.' I did philosophy with the Jesuits for about a year, and then I joined a bank. While I was th...
It was nice. Even in high school, I’d mostly had makeshift friends forged by the shared status of outcast. It was rare for me to discuss things so easily to someone outside of my family, but somehow Jill got me.
So I would always try and be the lightest I could. In high school, I really wouldn't eat. I would only have lunch and I would only have salads. And then it got so crazy as to just eating like a cracker or a cucumber a day and I would feel full.
Outside of my parents, it's my older sister, Ngum. She lives with me in Detroit and helps me with my day-to-day stuff. She's somebody I've always looked up to. When she was leaving high school and going to college, I wanted to follow in her footsteps...
I think that it's hard enough being an adolescent and wanting so much to fit in with your peers, your schoolmates, and to erase any sign of difference, to be part of the group. And being biracial but also being black in a predominately white school m...
In high school I was the dog, always, and I never have felt comfortable or right in my body, and part of my whole exhibitionist thing has probably been a way of testing to see whether or not I really was this repulsive creature that I felt like for s...
I remember playing with some friends and being aware that I was acting as I was playing with them - I would think of a character and pretend to be someone else. My parents also took me to ballet school, and there I think I was able to start communica...
Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up.
Well, let me tell you, if you're 45, had three children and are post-menopausal, you're not going to weigh what you did the day you graduated from high school. Get that out of your head. That's a media-driven ideal that you're never going to healthfu...
I lost relatives to AIDS. A couple of my closest cousins, favorite cousins. I lost friends to AIDS, high school friends who never even made it to their 21st birthdays in the '80s. When it's that close to you, you can't - you know, you can't really de...
We go to school so that when we grow up we can make lots of money, and we make lots of money so we can provide for our children, and we have children to provide for our retirement (because we don’t have any money left).
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in thei...
I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficu...
Clearing your head of everything you thought you knew, even your most cherished ideas, will give you the mental space to be educated by your present experience--the best school of all. You will develop your own strategic muscles instead of depending ...
When I was younger, I did a TV show in the U.K. for a couple years, and I learned a lot from that. It taught me a lot about being known amongst your peers and having to deal with a lot of derision from them. It's not easy being known as 'the kid from...
