We all go back to our roots. My father went to the central west, went to Ilfracombe in 1919. He was the manager of the wool scour there. And, Ilfracombe was right at the heart of Australia's great wool industry, and my mother was a teacher at Winton.
I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker's family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.
My father is an economist who specialized in foreign food policy, and my mother worked for AID, a branch of the State Department, so food in regards to world affairs was talked about a lot.
When I was about to break a world record and become well known, my mother used to say that for her the important thing was for me to become a doctor - a career which had not been possible in her generation and in her society. Sport was something to be set aside.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
My mother was the worst kind of stage mother. She would make me and my younger sister and brother little duckling costumes and put us in kiddie shows.
I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.
I am not a pregnant working mother wronged.
My mother can certainly be rough around the edges at times, but she also taught me to have compassion for people who have been wronged. She taught me to empathize with those who have made mistakes.
I've gone through that with my mother and father and here I was in a similar situation. I've wronged her and I've wronged the family. Because when these things happen, it doesn't just happen to you, it happens to the people around you and the family.
In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience.
My first favourite book was 'Are You My Mother?' A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure.
The biggest problem was convincing my father that organic food was worth eating. All he could think of was the nut loaf with yeast gravy that my mother made in the Seventies.
I used to take my mother to Yosemite. When I turned 14, I got my driver's license, and that's where she'd want to go, so I'd go take her there for two weeks.
You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.
I was very proud to be Mrs. Curtis Amy. My thing in life when I married Curtis Amy was being Mrs. Curtis Amy. Career was fine, but I was enthralled with being Curtis' wife. That was very important to me back then, and that's always important to a young lady from New Orleans. That's our upbringing: to be a wonderful wife and mother first.
I didn't know my mother was an actress until I was eight and she went back to work. At an even younger age than that, I'd wanted to be an actress, so when I saw her, I clearly remember thinking, 'This is a strange coincidence.'
I have always been a mother. When I was kid, I mothered my younger brother. I mothered my parents and even my boyfriends.
Your child is never not your child. You can be 90 and your mother 120, but your mother is still worried about you.
