I'm not immune to the charms of the female form. And when I was 17 and I spent every spare minute surfing, most of the girls we hung out with would be topless.
I grew up surfing on the north coast of New South Wales, and on most of the beaches, women never wore tops. When we were 10 or 11, me and my mates couldn't drive, so they'd take us surfing and then sit on the beach topless and read a book. I don't know if I quite saw them sexually, but there was physical intrigue.
Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bodies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
I hung out with all the guys in my neighborhood when I was little... I would, like, skateboard and go to skate parks, like, every day and do motor cross, like, every weekend, and I was kind of one of those girls.
There isn't a spare minute in the day. I have spent my life doing everything. I work. I go home. I do the shopping. I cook. Then there's the laundry and the dog. Most of my life, I have been a working mother. And even when I wasn't, I still did it all.
I hung out in Northeast Portland, I hung out in Beaverton. I knew a lot of people on every demographic. For me out there, I loved my time out there.
I spent a lot of time with a real detective, a lady detective inspector who was the only female detective inspector in the whole of East London. She and I hung out a lot. She showed me what she did and I spent time with her. So, [she was] a lot of the inspiration for the way I dressed and sometimes the dialogue in those interview scenes where we're cross examining and questioning the youths and trying to get a confession out of them.
I have spent much of my life where the boys are, first as a tomboy and then on Wall Street. Growing up, I loved every and any sport. I was frustrated by girls who didn't, so I spent most of my afternoons with the boys.
My father describes himself as a Pole of Lithuanian descent. At Southampton University, he read aeronautical engineering and then the family moved to Hong Kong - this was before I was born - where he designed aeroplanes. Back in the U.K., he worked as a civil engineer, although every spare minute was spent researching his family's history.
I was no different to any other kid of my generation. I played with my mates in the park every day, every spare minute I could.
If you look at the media coverage and surfing magazines, the one thing that really stands out is how hard it is to find a photo of a girl in a magazine unless it's an ad. It's kind of strange, still to this day. You see these great looking girls surfing so well that are amazingly talented... They are finally the total package.
The experts spent a great deal of time and study working out a formula which would be fair to every State and fair to every county and fair to every child, and would put the education dollar where that dollar is needed most, now.
My body back at the Playboy mansion was the most important thing in life back then because we were in the spotlight every minute. We had to look good. The girls who gained the weight, those were the girls who didn't get the work.
People stopped hanging out with me at the point when I stopped doing drugs. All of a sudden they didn't wanna hang out with me anymore. And I would have hung out with them. I mean they were killing themselves, but I still would have hung out with them.
I spent my 16th birthday high as a kite, jumping out of a tree topless in my local park just because it felt amazing hitting the ground.
I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute.
Surfing is all about uncertainty. That feeling of taking a risk, that leap of faith every time I jump into the ocean, that paddle out among things unseen — all of these make surfing very special