Cooking certain dishes, like roast pork, reminds me of my mother.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
I would not be a good mother. I mean, I love being an aunt to my niece and nephew. And I used to want to, like, adopt 10 kids - because I had friends who were adopted, and I thought that was the coolest thing, to be chosen. But again, my job is too selfish.
My mother was a full-time mom, and Dad started his own business. He was a mini-American dream story. Came from Russia at age 4, started his own pen business in Brooklyn. The company isn't around now, but he created his own healthy little world, leaving a decent legacy. My dad taught at Cooper Union but was never fully graduated himself.
If necessity is the mother of invention, it's the father of cooperation. And we're cooperating like never before.
My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.
People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European, born in Copenhagen, Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe, met my dad, fell in love, and then moved back to Rome, where I was raised, between Rome and Hamburg.
Apparently, my grandfather left from Cork to America without saying goodbye to his mother! The family in Longford is still not happy about that.
My uncle used to fight Vale Tudo, and my mother even cornered him in some of his fights.
I didn't care for school much - it was very strict, corporal punishment in the form of the 'tawse' was common and unpredictable, and I was often afraid - but I believe that I did well enough; indeed, my mother always regretted that I had not stayed long enough to become the 'dux,' as the best pupil was called.
My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric.
My mother gets told, 'Oh, you're so lucky that your daughters are doing so well.' She never corrects anybody when they assume Helen is her daughter.
My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.
If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.
From the time I was wee big, my mother was one of the first members of Mary Kay Cosmetics. Women going door-to-door and letting housewives have their own business - that was really a breakthrough. It was huge.
It was my mother who got me involved in gymnastics, sending me to classes when I was six just to stop me doing back flips on the couch and destroying the furniture.
A child too, can never grasp the fact that the same mother who cooks so well, is so concerned about his cough, and helps so kindly with his homework, in some circumstance has no more feeling than a wall of his hidden inner world.
It's incredibly rewarding to have people come up to me at readings and say, 'I'm not Chinese, but this is the relationship I have with my mother.' Or say, 'Your book made me think a lot about my parents, and I've decided to sign up for counseling.' That is mind-boggling.
With the counseling of my family doctor, my mother ended up turning to Weight Watchers and their children's program. I went to weekly meetings, got counseling and would exercise with my peers who were my size. It was the first time I saw a proper children's portion size, and it wasn't two burgers, it was one.
Usually, when a young girl is pregnant, she drops out of school and concentrates on being a mother. I thought that's what I had to do, but my counselors told me there was no way they would let me drop out. I had too much promise.
