My dad had a retail business in Leavenworth, Kansas, and there's a whole bunch of prisons there, so it was a backdrop of my childhood, these ominous prisons sitting off the road. ↗
These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off. ↗
It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things. ↗
Growing up in the business you have to grow up very fast - you do have a different type of childhood, that has its benefits and it has its drawbacks. ↗
My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn't always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have. ↗
The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out. ↗
But every day I tell my story, and be comfortable with my story and be comfortable with what I've done, and what I did, and how I am today, it lessens the likelihood it will ever happen. ↗
