I try to remember what it was like to be a kid in New York. I lived in different parts of my childhood in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, where 'When You Reach Me' is set, and also in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.
From when I was born to when I was 21, I never left Toronto. That's why I'm such a city cat.
I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn as a kid. I was born in New York, and my grandmother lived in Crown Heights, so there's a part of it that I feel this connection to.
I wasn't just playing football on the street. I grew up on the street.
I'm a thirty-something ranch wife, mother of four, moderately agoraphobic middle child who grew up on a golf course in the city.
As a kid from Texas, it always amazes me when city kids don't know how to ride a bike.
Growing up in Harlem, I was always in the parks playing ball.
Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.
When I grew up in central London, we had six pavement slabs for a garden.
I grew up on Avenue C, and Tompkins Square Park was my park. That was where I played ball every day. I lived in that park.
When I was growing up in New York, we were the anomaly. Our family stayed, but back then families didn't stay. Once you had a second kid, you immediately left, so the kids could run around outside.
Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be.
I would leave school every day and walk to my grandparents' house under the El because everyone worked. I was 6 and walking home alone from school. It was a different city and a different time.
Brooklyn, when I was growing up, was awesome. It was stoopball and stickball - a lot of kids... the baby boom generation were all in the area. It was just a really great place.
I'm the youngest of three children and grew up in Ealing, west London. My eldest sister, Nutun, is nine years older than me, and my middle sister, Rupa, is three years older.
When I was growing up, there weren't any Little Leagues in the city. Parents worked all the time. They didn't have time to take their kids out to play baseball and football.
Growing up in Paterson wasn't the easiest thing.
It was like I lived in a little suburban neighborhood in the middle of New York City because I could run around barefoot or, you know, completely independently from a very young age in the safety of this building where I knew everybody and where I had friends on every floor, and I knew the bellmen in the lobby.
I grew up in Manhattan on the Upper East Side.
When you're a kid with artistic yearnings brought up in the Bronx, you don't get fed up too easily.
I wrote three books about growing up in the Bronx.
I guess I probably took New York for granted. Growing up, playing in the street, going down to the Avenue to the record store and to the grocery store and stuff like that.
Growing up as a kid in inner city of Baltimore, Maryland, the way I played the game, I used to always steal the basketball.
I never 'shunned' L.A., like people say. And I do think you can raise children well there, but it's definitely harder.
As a kid in the projects, I always looked forward to spring break. We'd either have cousins visiting us for the week from up north, and we'd all play sports together, or sometimes I'd go to Vero Beach and hang with my cousins there.
