Music was a central part of my childhood because my mother played organ and piano in the church, and that meant all us kids had to be in the church choir.
I was 16 when I got a scholarship to study classical composition at a conservatory. By that time I had already listened to Scottish folksong with my mother, sung in church choirs, and had sung solo with Benjamin Britten conducting.
In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
The Internet is a big place where a lot of people can voice their opinions, and my mother chooses to pick fights with random people from all over the world who don't have the nicest things to say about me.
My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
My mother cooked like a scientist. She had a giant Chinese-style cleaver that she chopped with, and a cupboard full of spices.
I remember watching steak being cooked on TV and wanting to try it. As a special treat, my mother cooked it for me, and I thought this would be the time I would eat with a knife and fork. Alas, I ate it with chopsticks!
Feminists of my mother's generation argued that both mom and dad should work a little less and each do some of the household chores. My parents, for example, split everything 50/50. Even though my father is a terrible cook, he still made dinner exactly half the time.
I am still the same village girl from Dhing who used to help my father in the paddy field, help mother in household chores, run for hours on the streets of Dhing, play football with my Mon Jai group friends.
My grandmother and mother were from Italy, so I was raised Catholic. That kind of just meant going to church on Easter and Christmas. I saw a radical transformation in my family when they started going to a Christian church. I watched them fall in love with God.
I was raised in a Christian home and, in fact, my mother led me to Christ as a youngster.
My parents are both pastors. In the '80s and '90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman - especially a married woman and a mother - to be a pastor.
I remember as a child, my mother loved Dean Martin. Every Christmas, about the only Christmas album that we were able to listen to was the Dean Martin Christmas album.
My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.
The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye played my parents so well that I really thought I was in my living room at Christmas. My mother couldn't have been played more correctly.
There's no denying that Christy Turlington looks good in everything, but it's especially great when she uses her supermodel looks and charitable spirit to support the organization she founded, Every Mother Counts.
For an Ethiopian mother, if you have a chubby kid, it means you're doing something good.
When I was a little kid, my mother and I used to watch the 'Golden Globes' and I would dress up and she would get sparkling apple cider and we would make a tray of hors d'oeuvres and watch it together. And I would get up and make a pretend speech.
I was preppy, then suddenly switched around age 14. I asked my mother to go to this vintage store, and she let me buy a leopard swing coat, pink cigarette pants, and lime-green gloves.
