I was raised Catholic. I went to Catholic school for 12 years.
I grew up Catholic, and when you've grown up, and these belief systems have been presented to you at a young, impressionable age, I don't know that you can shake them. Even if your rational mind tells you something else, sometimes they're so deeply ingrained that they are with you for the rest of your life.
Since his childhood, Bappa has observed me singing and practicing and is well aware of all sorts of recording and singing arrangements. I have a studio at my home, so whenever he needs my help I make sure I stand by him. I often sing for the tunes that he composes.
Growing up the son of a director has made me very aware of the various turns that a directing career can take. Sometimes your films turn out exactly as you want. Sometimes they don't. I spent a lot of my childhood on sets. I think as a joke, my father gave me a line of dialogue in each of his films during the worst moments of my puberty.
I don't think I ate a green vegetable until I was 30. I didn't grow up with a mom who enforced that at all.
When I was a kid, my favorite movies were the George Pal version of 'War Of The Worlds,' 'Them,' and 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' Those movies were scary! They haunted my nightmares for years, so when I started writing, I wanted to write a story that was just as big and just as scary.
People are loving me because they don't even know me. "You're Bob's son. We love you." So I think that's a good thing for a father to leave so much that people are loving their children. I'm proud of that.
I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.
I'm a military kid, both parents in the military - Mom did 12 years, Dad did 21, served in two wars. So discipline is something that was huge.
My dad liked a lot of Motown, but I didn't listen to it until my teenage years.
My mum was never too keen on TV, so we kids all went to the library and got books out. Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him.
I have always been true to the people who have influenced me as a young boy.
Since an early age I was taught to be very politically aware and knew from childhood that the process was something I wanted to contribute towards if I could.
I grew up with Apocalypse Now and Badlands, so I had a real awe thing going.
I'm admitting that I don't know that to be true, but it does sound pretty good. So a big part of my childhood was affecting black culture and black accents and black music and anything black I was into.
My first favorite band that made music important to me was the Beatles. I was a little kid. I didn't know who was singing what song or who wrote what song.
When I was a kid, my father brought home the autobiography of Sid Luckman, the great Chicago Bears quarterback - probably an extra copy from the sports department where he worked. It was the first sports biography I ever read.
As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.
When I was 12, I had a fondness for horror movies like the 'Wolfman.' The boy next door said I should read Poe.
When I was a little girl, there was this unbelievably cool female bus driver who'd work near us. I remember thinking I'd like to be her when I grew up.
I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.
The character of a child is formed largely during the first twelve years of his life. He spends 16 times as many waking hours in the home as in the school, and 126 times as many hours in the home as in the church. Each child is, to a great degree, what he is because of the ever-constant influence of home environment and the careful or neglectful training of parents. Home is the best place for the child to learn self-control, to learn that he must submerge himself for the good of another. It is the best place in which to develop obedience, which nature and society will later demand.
Even as a kid, I read 'Jung - Reflections and Individuation In Fairy Tales'; all the inner circle of Jung was a real huge thing for me.
At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'
