I had no blood relatives till I made some.
It's no secret that I have, at best, a strained and awkward relationship with my dad. The Wasserman family - my mom, my sister, Lew and Edie - raised me. They are the people I define as my family.
In 1944 James Arthur and Minnie Susan were added to the Marx household.
Parents - especially step-parents - are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.
I never had that wicked stepmother or evil stepfather thing at all. I'm very close to both step-parents and I consider them to be my parents, too.
There's a lot of, unfortunately, a lot of divorced families. I come from a divorced family... and you have parents meet someone and they have kids and you're with that whole having to meet new people and be your family. That's always a hard thing to do.
Like every child of divorce, I had parent-trap fantasies. In fact, 'The Parent Trap' was my favourite movie. I was a Nineties baby, so I particularly loved the Lindsay Lohan version.
Family doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a mother, a father, a little brother, and an older sister.
My parents are Andre Previn and Mia, but obviously, they're not even my real parents.
We tend to think of divorced or complicated families as a modern invention, and that is not at all true. You only have to read the Greek myths to see broken homes, widows, divorce, stepchildren, children trying to get along with new parents.
