We moved around a ton when I was a kid. I think we lived in 9 different houses before I was 15 - we moved from the city back to the suburbs; different suburbs, different houses, all over the place.
I grew up in the suburbs, sometimes country-like suburbs because we moved around, but mostly suburbs.
I've always traveled, as a kid my parents moved me around, a different place in Germany every four years. But I got the travel bug when I was a kid, living in different countries.
I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.
All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed.
Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.
When I was younger - in elementary school - my parents are both teachers, so we moved around a lot. For the most part we always lived, before we settled south of Dallas, we always lived in the outskirts of city suburbs, kind of in these weird, desolate neighborhoods. Very brown and flat settings. I love Texas, I love the openness.
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.
Brantford was the fixed point of my universe, growing up. Both sets of grandparents lived there, with various cousins and uncles and aunts, and no matter how far we'd moved off, we came back there for regular visits. In a way no other houses have ever been, my grandparents' houses were 'home,' and the sale of the last of those houses was hard.
The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.
During the six years I spent writing my novel 'The Incarnations,' I lived in seven cities in four countries. I moved in and out of 17 different houses and flats in Beijing, Seoul, Colorado, Boston, Leeds, Washington D.C., London and Shenzhen.
I didn't run into racism until we moved to Nassau when I was ten and a half, but it was vastly different from the kind of horrendous oppression that black people in Miami were under when I moved there at 15. I found Florida an antihuman place.
Before I moved to the Isle of Wight, I lived in the suburbs of London and saw 'Fantasia,' and it scared the living daylights out of me. And I didn't go back to the movies until many years later to see a Lasse Hallstrom film.
We lived in eight or nine different houses and six or seven different apartments growing up.
I was born in St. Louis and lived in Pittsburgh for a bit, before my family moved to Nigeria, where they're from. We lived there for three or four years and came back to the States when I was about ten. I realised that I'd gone from place to place not fitting in. The thing that helped me fit in when moving around and not having a ton of friends was that I could make art. That was the through-line.
I remember, as a kid, going into other people's houses. Everything was different. The smells in the kitchen were different; the clothing was different. That bothered me. There's something very mysterious about other families and the way they function.
Both my parents are English and I was born in West Africa, and I moved around as a kid, lived in Bristol, lived in Buckinghamshire and Surrey as a kid, and then moved when I was 16.