I always try to write from memory, and I always try to use memory as an editor. So when I'm thinking of something like a relationship or whatever, then I'm letting my memory tell me what the important things were.
My brother and I had a real love-hate relationship with my success. There was some bitterness there that I didn't understand until recently, but I told him that if I ever did a record I wanted him to play on it.
I'm not into 'Let's go out with one guy on a Monday and another guy on a Wednesday' - that's just not me. I'm a relationship kind of girl. I like a twosome. Some people get excited about being single. I don't.
Yeah, we pretty much had a form and a shape by that time - a style - and I think one of the advantages of not having any relationship to any other puppeteer was that it gave me a reason to put those together myself for the needs of television.
In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we're sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining.
I've been working on Barb for a while. I looked at her as a sort of every woman. She's incredibly strong; she's incredibly generous. She's seemingly insane because she is in the situation of a polygamous relationship, but she had definite reasons to ...
It's a very difficult thing losing a parent, but I think there's an added complication for me, because he was so well-loved and he had this very open charm that made people feel they had a personal relationship with him.
In my late 30s, I flirted with the idea of having a child without necessarily being in a steady relationship. But I've never had a strong maternal urge, and then I got cancer of the womb - luckily caught at an early stage - so that put paid to that.
I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. 'Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.' First of all, my girl is black: she's Jamaican.
Knowing so many people like myself who are singers and in traveling bands, the people you're in a relationship with feel slighted because they feel you're giving all your energy to your fans, and there's a lot of truth to that.
If you take the hard facts of a failed relationship, it's pretty grim. But if you make an album out of it, and if the violins represent all the tears, you create something magical out of something very normal.
The problem is, when I talk about heartbreak or whatever, people want to melt it down to some break-up of a relationship, but it's not about that. If you're a sensitive person, just stepping outside can be heartbreaking.
The way I become friends with somebody is a slow process. You can't just spill your guts and tell them everything about yourself and expect them to listen and understand you because you don't know them. It's the same thing with a relationship.
I'm not a divorce monger by any means, but if you're not happy in a relationship, and you've grown apart, it's not healthy for a couple to stay together. It's better for kids to see two happy parents than two miserable parents.
Couples counseling gets many couples back together. But not all, and not always. For your own sake and that of your children, however, I recommend it - I almost insist on it - as the first step for anyone unhappy in a relationship.
I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.
I shoot people in a way that makes the audience feel equal to them. And it's hard to express and it's hard to execute but I think it works on every level - the choice of the material the choice of the actor, my relationship with the actor, and so on.
You know, we're each the hero of our own story and we perceive what's going on around us, and especially in a relationship, from the kind of viewpoint of, 'Well, this is my story, and I'm the hero of that, and I justify what I do around it.'
I'm pretty sensitive. My feelings get hurt a lot easier than people think, but I try take it all with grain of salt. For a relationship, I want someone who is really secure, confident and fulfilled, not tripping with what I do.
I've never had a relationship with a record executive. I always went to the record company by someone that liked my playing. Then they would get fired, and I'd be left with the record company. And then - because they got fired - the record company wo...
That balance between involvement and detachment is what novelists do. It's the ideal relationship between a novelist and a character, I think, total involvement and identity and empathy, stopping short of being autobiographical - in my case, anyway -...
