My father was one of 11. He was an attorney. My mother worked for the Syracuse newspaper as a columnist before she became a stay-at-home mother.
Liza is in the tabloids almost as much as our mother was. She has struggled with her own ghosts and shadows.
Fortunately for me, my mother loved travel. Our first non-beach family trip abroad - to England, France, and Switzerland - came when I was 11, and thereafter, we often tagged along on my father's European business trips.
My mother had to tailor what I watched.
In grade school, my mother, who was a professional tailor, would make all my clothes. I became obsessed with designing them myself.
I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes.
My mother was a listener. I'm a talker. I'm very comfortable talking.
My mother told me I was dancing before I was born. She could feel my toes tapping wildly inside her for months.
Though I didn't quite plan it that way, I had my two sons at just about the same ages my mother saw me and my sister off to college, and my first novel was published when I was 46. This 'tardiness' isn't something I'm proud of, but I'm happy to be an inspiration to others who arrive at these milestones later than most of us do.
My mother reads tarot cards, actually, but I won't let her read mine.
Most turkeys taste better the day after, my mother's tasted better the day before.
The tattoo that means the most to me would probably be my Chinese symbol on my neck. It means love - I got it on Mother's Day.
After watching my poor mother being sometimes neglected by my father, it was almost tattooed on my brain that I would never cause hardship or despair to a partner.
The daunting task of being a mother, a wife, and an independent career or professional person is really taxing.
I think it's important to remember that you go into something like marriage knowing that you don't know very much about it at all. But I do look at the marriage of my mother and stepdad, and what makes it work for them is that it's a team effort.
My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.
I don't really see why some of those topical lines have to be crossed to get a point across. I want a mother and daughter, a teenage girl and her mom, to be able to come to the show and both enjoy it on the same level.
Although my mother didn't necessarily approve of teenage girls wearing heels, she made an exception for me when I was 14 because she didn't want me to be self-conscious about my height - or to slouch.
My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the '60s to the '80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars, and presidents.
So, babies are taken from their mothers because they get temporarily insane and it's not the mother's fault. This is the thing: they shouldn't feel ashamed. They didn't cause this. It is not something they did to themselves.
