There's a time where people were out holding posters in protest outside shows I was doing, and thankfully, we've moved past that. And a lot of country stations wouldn't play me. They were more conservative than I was.
You know how most kids have posters of sports heroes on their walls? They gave me reams of the old news copy, and I had those taped in my bedroom. And I would practice reading the news.
My grandmother introduced me to B.B. King. She wasn't someone who had a lot of posters, but there was a big poster of B.B. King on the wall as soon as you walked into her house in Meridian, Mississippi.
I started posting covers online and having this crazy determination about what I wanted to do and just went for it. I was like, 'Okay, no one else can create my future for me, and no one can get what I want for me, so I have to go out and get it myself.'
I wasn't trying to write a book; it wasn't even in my vision. I was posting stuff online just because it made me feel relieved - as a way of getting things off my chest.
I wouldn't be posting videos of me in drag or doing a remake of Zoolander's orange mocha frappuccino scene if I didn't still like attention.
I've started looking at my own father a bit funny. He assures me, though, that I really am the son of a Scottish postman.
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.
Some years ago, I was invited to speak in Houston, Texas. They said I was a founder of 'postmodern theatre'. So I said to my office, 'This is ridiculous for me to go and speak about postmodern theatre when I don't know what it means, but... they're paying me a lot of money, so I'll go.'
There are some beautiful books out there. But the ones that leave me cold are the ones where I feel - it's that postmodern thing - it's more experimentation with language than it is a deep compassionate falling into another human being's experience.
I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.
'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous.
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my patients will not even be postponed. Another surgeon would step in and take over. The reason to do research and writing is that it at least makes me feel not entirely replaceable. If I didn't write, I don't know if I would do surgery.
And when we used to play and fight in the streets in Brooklyn and I would get hurt or something, my mother would always come out and save me. So that sort of postponed the inevitable about getting a good beating, without having somebody to come and save you.
I got my first show at Blum & Poe because Paul McCarthy postponed his show, and they came to my studio and asked me if I could put together a show in two weeks.
On my posts, I would tell people, 'If you like this, give it a share.' If you go online and look at my videos, you might see where I have 80,000 likes, but 525,000 shares. That's where you gain more people as followers coming in. It took me a second to learn it all, but now that I have, it's been a blessing and a curse.
I have more than 4 million followers on Instagram. All the companies I work for want me to guarantee how much I'll post for them, but I'm not going to force my career onto the people who follow me. I refuse to do 40 Instagram posts about any campaign.
My parents taught me practical things, about how important hard work, discipline and the necessity of managing your own money were. Their values were very much the values of the postwar middle class.
I've always said that, growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.
