My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.
My mother was the kind of person who was very much part of her tribe and very much a satellite of her tribe. She was the girl who left her family at the age of 17 and went to Washington. My mother was orphaned at three and then was brought up by my aunt Goldie. So, yes she belonged, but there was a part of her that didn't.
My parents were practicing Jews. My mother grew up in an orthodox synagogue, and after my grandfather died, she went to a conservative synagogue and a little later ended up in a reform synagogue. My father was in reform synagogues from the beginning.
I saw my dad, my mother and all the people who were part of the party in Ottawa, and of different parties, working really hard for what they believed in.
My mother did a tremendous job of raising four children in Ottawa under a spotlight.
When I was about five or seven years old my mother was placed in a mental institution and so we were with our father who worked very hard, and we had to figure a lot of things out.
Being a mother was too important to me to risk running out of time.
Mother beat the hell out of us. She'd have wild outbursts.
How can a child adhere to school and the notion of secularism when they see their mother rejected from a school outing, stigmatized, left on the sidelines, just because she has a scarf on her head?
When I was a little kid, I was chunky. My mother would always joke she would have to get me husky jeans for larger kids. My wife reminds me sometimes, if I overdo it with chocolate chip cookies, that I will have to wear husky pants again.
Where the daughter sees power, the mother feels powerless. Daughters and mothers, I found, both overestimate the other's power - and underestimate their own.
One day, when my son was eight, he came into the kitchen while I was cooking and said: 'You put bad words in your books, don't you?' No doubt he had overheard my mother, who often tells people who ask about my work: 'Well, you'll never find her books in the Christian bookstore.'
I was not wary of playing a mother on screen but wasn't sure if I could do justice to it. Would I be able to showcase that kind of overpowering love without being a 'real' mother?
After a tumultuous 20-year marriage, my father up and left one day, leaving my mother to raise three boys without the means to do so. And yet somehow she did. At the age of 50, she enrolled in nursing school and became a nurse and worked countless overtime hours and weekend shifts just to give us a fighting chance.
My mother was a Muslim and dad a Hindu. I got the best upbringing that anyone could. Never did I see any angst in my family owing to that: each practiced their own religion. My existence is the harmony that these two communities can achieve if they try.
My parents divorced when I was born, and my mother is a political science professor, like a feminist Mormon, which is sort of an oxymoron.
I use a lot of sunblock, which is something I learned from my mother at a young age - to stay out of the sun and be careful of skin cancer. We live in a time where global warming is at its maximum level. The ozone is destroyed, and our skin is exposed to sunbeams on a daily basis.
When I was a kid, I loved really loud things. My grandmother and I went to the Fulton Mall, and I bought a three-piece suit that was paisley. Paisley over the whole suit. I was 6 and thought it was great. My mother took a photo of me in it, sent it to my grandmother, and burned the suit.
I used to love sitting on the bathroom floor in my pajamas and watching my mother get ready for an event. She'd stand in front of her vanity and apply bright red and blue makeup - it was the '80s, you know.
A chef's palate is born out of his childhood, and one thing all chefs have in common is a mother who can cook.
