My early life was a bit of a mess but it was no one's fault. It was just how it was.
There was a three-year chunk as a teen where I should have been tranquilized and put in a cage.
I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
I kind of struggled as a 10-year-old to make out what it meant that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed within two months of each other. I think I was 14 when Watergate happened and a president was impeached. So between my birth and age 14, I just saw a lot of turmoil.
My first novel, 'In the Drink,' begun when I was 29 and floundering and published when I was 36 and married, was about a 29-year-old woman whose life was even more screwed up than my own had been.
My life has been very much a roller coaster ride. Not just the boxing part, not just the acting part, just my childhood, what I was into at a young age and the things I was exposed to, it's just very abnormal.
My twenties were tumultuous at best... I think.
My entire twenties were filled with decisions that make me think, 'You had to go there, huh?' But that's part of exploration and I think a lot of the most beautiful moments of my life and a lot of the most amazing things have come out of some of the most tumultuous times.
I moved up over Lower East Side and I was adopted by eight foster parents; I lived all over New York City with these parents, man, till I was about ten years old.
I was a pretty wild kid, and I probably lived 48 years in my first 20. But I always seemed to have a true line of faith for some reason.
In the ten years since I had run away from home...I had gone through more strange experiences than the average person crowds into a whole lifetime.
I think that clearly it has an influence, to be coming of age during the punk rock era, to come from a difficult and sporadically violent background, to have been in and out of such chaos, I think it actually helps. But I don't know for sure.
