When I did see the story of Persephone, I was really drawn to it. Persephone, the goddess of spring, was kept from Olympus by her mother, Demeter, because Demeter was very worried that the gods of Olympus would do something terrible to her.
I started drawing when I was about 2, mostly pictures of my mother and my sister. When I got into school, instead of taking the notes that I should have been taking, I was drawing in all of my notebooks. It was an artwork thing for me at first.
When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there.
When a woman gives birth to a child, the child needs to be able to digest the mother's milk; but when this child is old enough to begin to eat other foods, there is some switching off of this ability to consume milk.
After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as 'night, Mother.'
People came to my parents' parties because they were going to have fun and, if lucky, our mother would belly dance. What they didn't know was that the hostess made sure every morsel placed in front of them was pure and without anything artificial, no...
I was really young, just playing with puppets a lot and doing all the voices and acting it out - normal kid stuff. But then I'd hear my mother talking about it to her relatives, marveling at it as if it was something unique. And it made me realize, '...
The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said.
My greatest inspiration is my mother, the bravest person I ever knew. She overcame incredible odds, worked while raising two kids, and made it all look incredibly simple. Even in her final days succumbing to cancer, she fought like a champion.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
My mother was widely loved, and rightly so – and widely regarded as too sweet for words. Well, she had them buffaloed. Any woman who could out-stubborn a dachshund deserved to be accorded the wary and respectful affection the dachshund gave her.
I find being a mother is a huge advantage. Of course, I'm probably a little more tired than I might be if I didn't have children, but I think they provide me the balance that I need to keep my mind off of lifting.
My mother was the favorite child of her parents. My father was the favorite child of his parents. The result of these two favorite children was me. And I am an only child. So I was convinced that I was the center of the universe.
I grew up as an only child with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif.
The first person besides my mother who believed in me was a man whose last name I never knew. He was my boss, the manager of Swenson's Ice Cream shop.
My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.
Even as a 10-year-old, I remember trying to explain to my mother and stepfather how upset and frustrated a messy room made me. But they just couldn't grasp it. They wanted me to be playing with baseballs and frogs while I wanted to be scouring garage...
I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine.
I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern...
I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
I remember the first time I read Freud, I was 25 or 30, and I was expecting it to be about the Oedipus complex. But what I actually discovered confirmed my own common experience, that you also had little boys who loved their fathers and little girls ...
