I am a person who grew up with two wonderful parents and a wonderful family and a person who has done well in life.
I'm from a family of educators. I grew up with books in my house and in my hands and my parents in my life.
I grew up with a single pair of shoes until I grew into the next size. My parents believed in the American dream and the power of education but didn't have the money to send me to college. I realized early on that I needed to go against the flow and be better than everyone else to support my family.
It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.
Family is something that I grew up with, and the Mexican culture has a lot of, you know - Sunday is the day you spend with your family, and you have 40 to 50 people at your house, the uncles and the cousins, and I grew up with that.
I grew up in a small segregated steel town 6o miles outside of Cleveland, my parents grew up in the segregated south. As a family we struggled financially, and I grew up in the '60s and '70s where overt racism ruled the day.
I always love the soapy conflicts between somebody's family of origin and their new family - 'Do I have Thanksgiving at my husband's parents' house, or at my parents' house?'
I grew up in rural Alabama, 50 miles from Montgomery, in a very loving, wonderful family: wonderful mother, wonderful father. We attended church; we went to Sunday school every Sunday.
Although my family is originally from Jamaica, I grew up in a diverse community in south London. As my parents were immigrants they made every effort to integrate and we used to go to a wonderful church where we befriended families from all over the world.
When I was young, I grew up in a family of working-class people. Not just my parents, but my extended family, as well.
My family was reasonably liberal. Some kids I grew up with, their parents forced them to join the military, and my parents never, ever even brought it up. I imagine just looking at me, they were like "Not an army officer."
I grew up in Boston, and we'd have every Thanksgiving at my parents' house there.
I grew up in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, with my parents and sisters, but my family would drive every weekend to Hammonton, where both my grandparents lived and where my parents were raised.
I'm really fortunate. I grew up in a wonderful household with great Irish Catholic parents.
I grew up in church, and I have a wonderful family that always supported that.
I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry at the dinner table.