My grandmother and I followed my mother here, to a house a block north of Hollywood Boulevard but a million miles away from Hollywood, if you know what I mean. We would hang out behind the ropes and look at the movie stars arriving at the premieres.
A man can't pass on, like a mother could, an awareness of your body, or sensuality, or what it means to be a woman. I was never taught what femininity was. I learnt it - or rather I invented it - on my own. I tended not to talk at all, if people were...
My mother was a stout woman with a man's name - Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes - no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.
I remember when I watched 'Hellraiser' with my mother. She cried when she saw my name in the opening credits, and I had to tell her that that was the happiest she was going to be for the next two hours.
My mother treats me exactly the same as she has always done, and the same as my older sisters. She tells me off when I need it, and sometimes I do need telling to go to my room or to do my homework.
Our father died when we were very young, so our mother raised six kids. We saw the world filtered through her eyes, being a minority woman raising six kids.
My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married.
I was always the one leading the way in terms of wanting to do acting, singing and dancing. I was lucky that my mother had a very well-adjusted perspective of the world and never pressured me to do anything I didn't want to do.
People usualy use "move on" when their heart broke because of love. Most don't understand when father, mother, sister or brother has died, you might have needed more strength to move on. It was like living with no air.
The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'
My mother, twenty-two, was Harriet Gautier Brooks, named for her paternal grandmother, but always called Hallie. My father, twenty-six, was Albert Horton Foote, named for his father and great-grandfather, and I was named Albert Horton Foote, Jr.
I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literat...
My father was a military judge, and my mother was a psychiatric social worker. My brother and sister and I were moved around constantly, in and outside the U.S., living in Germany for much of our teens.
Thirty, 40 years ago, more than that now, even, the cook was certainly at the bottom of the social scale. And any mother would've wanted their child to marry a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, not a cook. Now, we are genius, it's different.
I was a very shy child. I remember being in a kindergarten open house with my mother and children saying 'Hi' to me, and I still remember feeling this way - but I don't know why - but I wouldn't even say 'Hi' back. I was that shy.
I always wondered why God was supposed to be a father," she whispers. Fathers always want you to measure up to something. Mothers are the ones who love you unconditionally, don't you think?
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver's test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught.
Lately I've been going to all these high schools talking to the students, answering their questions, listening to what they have to say. It has been an incredible journey to be around them and try to give them what my mother gave me.
It's not like the original movie where you thought it was the mother committing the murders, but it was actually the son. I don't think it's possible to create the kind of shock today that we created in 1959. And I don't even want to try.
