My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.
My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly. My idea of food hell is the salad cream they'd pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting.
I was 37 when my father died-and I no longer had any freedom of choice over what I would do with the rest of my life.
In the sudden absence of husbands, fathers, brothers and beaus, white Southern women discovered a newfound freedom - one that simultaneously granted them more power in relationships and increased their likelihood of heartbreak.
My father described this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbor, holding high a torch to welcome people seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love.
I never complain. I chose the road of fighting with the Ukrainian oligarchy in 1996, and have paid for this with my freedom and that of my husband, my father and my close friends.
I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.
The biggest problem in my life is trying to be the kind of man that I want to be, the father that I want to be, and how to process the failure of my marriage.
My father worked for the Foreign Office, so he was away a lot of the time. We were a very volatile family. There was a lot of love and a lot of conflict. The conflict kicked in mostly during my adolescence.
I come from an interracial family: My father is from Nigeria, and so he is African-American, and my mother is American and white, so I rarely see skin color. It's never an issue for me.
One of the things I would have loved to have had was a family that worked better together, although I love my mother and father to bits.
My mother, at least twice, cancelled our family's subscription to the newspaper I was working on, because she was so mad about its treatment of my father.
I was baptized Methodist, but I was mainly raised First Church of NFL, which is to say that my family, especially my father, was much more concerned with watching football on Sundays than attending services.
My father, Abe, was a small businessman. For 32 years, he ran an exterminating company. That may explain why our family always associated the smell of roach spray with love.
Your most important friendships should be with your own brothers and sisters and with your father and mother. Love your family. Be loyal to them. Have a genuine concern for your brothers and sisters.
As I was growing up, you know, I'm a white Jewish American born to Holocaust parents. My father fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and my mother's family had fled the czars of Russia before that.
For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.
My mother worked in advertising and my father was a journalist. But they split up when I was three and I grew up in a single-parent family. My mum brought my brother and I up.
There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things.
My parents were drawn to the idea that there was space and opportunity in Australia. For the meagre sum of £10, you could sail your entire family out to Australia, so that's what my father chose to do.
