I am lucky in that my children are grown, my youngest is twenty-seven. I didn't have the conflict between artist and mother while they were young because I really focused in, very much, on the mothering aspect.
So much of my sense of who I am is tied to mothering. When they left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space.
So, I was born and raised the youngest of seven children on this really beautiful mountain in Southern Idaho. But my dad had some radical beliefs. And because of those beliefs, we were isolated. So I was never allowed to go to school or to the doctor.
I think I was very lucky to have grown up with an artist's studio in the house. It was a kind of life that was possible. Yeah, it made it kind of harder because the standards were higher, but there was no pressure.
Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.
It was a really lucky childhood and while, yeah, there were bits of darkness, which is known about because my mother has made no bones about her struggle with depression, the overriding memory of it is a very happy, good one.
We were very lucky. My mother and stepmothers were on very, very good terms, and so we, the children, grew up as brothers and sisters.
Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.
I specially want to have young women not to wait as I did until my children were grown, but young women to come in to gain their seniority so they could be respected leaders at a much earlier age. It's important for all women to see young women who share their experience whether it's as a working mom with young children, who understands the struggle and the aspirations of young women in a similar situation. And if they don't have family and they're pursuing their career women should see that as well.
I like running. I am lucky for that; I don't find it hard. I like it as much as relaxing, actually. I am very focused on driving, and I don't like to party too much; that's just who I am.
I am a very lucky person because I am not focused on social media and all that happens around.
When I was very young, I started to make friends with much, much older people. So when I was twenty, my friends were fifty, and I never really went through forty because I would watch them die and I would feel younger. So you make friends with older people and you will always feel young no matter what.
I love my children, but I don't really want to talk about them. I'm not that much of a freakish middle-aged mother, I'm just very lucky, and there isn't much more to say. I'd like not to be constantly expected to be a spokesman for things that are part of the natural rhythm of a woman's life.
You never know when someone is videotaping you or trying to capture your image. I see how it makes some people crazy. But I am really lucky. I don't understand it. I really, honestly, am much more focused on my personal life.
'The Black Magician Trilogy' was about a conflict between countries and was very limited and almost claustrophobic in its range of settings, while 'The Age of the Five' was about a conflict between continents.
I don't think I'd have been able to be what I am if it wasn't for my mother. I started in the industry very young. I needed my mom to look into every aspect of my career.
It just struck me as really odd that there were all of these conversations going on about what young women were up to. Were young women having too much sex? Were young women politically apathetic? Are young women socially engaged or not? And whenever these conversations were happening, they were mostly happening by older women and by older feminists. And maybe there would be a younger woman quoted every once in a while, but we weren't really a central part of that conversation. We weren't really being allowed to speak on our own behalf.