My dad is a civil engineer, and my mom is a stay-at-home mom. The fact that my parents weren't really involved in music was kind of good, because it meant that I had something that was private and personal.
We're all a big hippie family so I got five sisters and a bunch of different mothers. Not really, but my sisters' mothers are all good friends with my mother. We're a big family, 25 people.
Our parents were a test tube and a turkey baster.
Those days of every child having a mummy and daddy who lived at home - Daddy went to work, and Mummy stayed at home and took care of everyone - those days have almost gone, and it's so much more unconventional now.
My parents are not together, but they were both always around.
Even when my parents were together, they both had to travel and work, and it wasn't like they had nine-to-five jobs. In that way, it wasn't a normal family life.
I'm not a housewife in any way.
We're a role-reversal family in every way possible. And I love that our country has evolved to that. It doesn't matter who makes money, as long as something is rolling in and you're happy.
There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.
If the standard route for creating a family had worked for me, I wouldn't have met this child. I needed to know her. I needed to be her mother. She is, in every way my daughter.
Having a baby had always seemed the easiest and most natural thing to do, and I had never felt - even in my most furtive days of coming out - that being gay would mean I could not become a mother.
My mother is gay. She was married to my dad up until I was 9. She was just like, 'I'm tired of this. I'm just going to be with who I want to be with.' So I've been raised by women, through my mom and also my aunt. My aunt is bi, and most of her partners have been women. I was always surrounded by a very strong tribe of people.
I come from the most normal family. I've always been the oddball.
I'm passionately opposed to the nuclear family, with its mom and dad and their 2.4 children. I think it's the most neurotic life-style ever developed.
Marriage is a definite no-no. I am totally married to my company. Emotionally, my mother fills up the void in my life. So there it is. My company is a spouse I will never cheat on, and my mother completes me as a son. I think I have a full family unit of my own.
Sure, my childhood was unusual. All these eccentric, wild people frequented our home: rock stars, drag queens, models, bikers, freaks. But I was not this little rich girl. My mom and I lived in an apartment.
I didn't grow up in a traditional family, and I never had a family dinner around the table, so whenever I actually had a dinner 'plan,' it meant a lot to me; it made me feel excited and safe.
My father was a freelance writer/director/producer, and my mother was a stewardess for Pan-Am. It was very non-traditional.
I have four kids with three mums, but I'm very close to them all.
Why should I marry? One marries to have children, but I already have children! My nieces and nephews are my children.
I don't think we should be a model family living in a model home.
My mother never married my father. She was married to and divorced from another man, then she married and divorced my stepfather and then, ultimately, they ended up getting back together.
I have three dads: my biological father, God and Bob Dylan.
No matter what Joe Hoffman and Wade Preston say, it's not gender that makes a family; it's love. You don't need a mother and a father; you don't necessarily even need two parents. You just need someone who's got your back.
For my own family, I would always choose the makeshift, surrogate family formed by various characters unrelated by blood.
