My mother very bravely put me into rehab two weeks after my father died.

I'm glad to say my father never felt ashamed of me, but my mother probably did.

My father left me when I was 6. My mother tried to take care of all of us on public assistance.

Because my father was often absent on naval duty, my mother suffered me to do much as I pleased.

My father used to sing to me in my mother's womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats.

I get whatever placidity I have from my father. But my mother taught me how to take it on the chin.

When my mother died, I fell apart. My father wanted to control me. As a consequence, I ran away to America.

My father worked in a bank while my mother looked after my four brothers and me, the only girl in our family.

My father, obviously, and my mother were inspirations. My uncle, Frank Harper, he was an absolute mentor for me.

Both my parents died on the young side. My father was 45, and my mother was 61, so cancer's affected me in a big way.

My parents were very supportive of me and my artistic endeavours. My father and mother came to every school play I ever did.

I was raised in Brooklyn and in Baltimore. My father was a bookkeeper. When I was 36 years old, my mother told me I was adopted.

I told my mother at about the seventh year of therapy that I had been abused sexually by my father, and she hung up the phone on me.

My mother told me once that she and my father agreed that I would not be brought up Jewish in Chicago. She had me going to a Methodist church.

My parents are huge influences on me. My mother was an English teacher. My father played professional rugby and coached rugby for the Irish rugby team.

My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities.

Growing up, my father coached my basketball team, and my mother drove me into St. Louis for various rehearsals between musical productions and Radio Disney.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.

When a child is small, it is his mother who is mainly responsible for the way he is brought up. So it was with me. I belonged in those days to my mother rather than my father.

My mother had me when she was 15. My father died before I was born. So my mother was a teenage widow, and she used herself as her greatest example so I wouldn't end up in her position.

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. Interestingly, the person who informed me of this spoke only matter-of-factly, with no hint of the gossip's wicked delight.

I have got my story. Adoptees rarely get our stories. We only know what we are told. I don't even have my story, really. My mother won't tell me. She won't tell me who my father is. She won't tell me the story of my birth.

I was about 10 when I first began to sing. My mother had been away for three weeks, and I learned 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina.' When she came back, I sang it in front of her, my auntie Linda, my father, my uncle Jim, and my grandmother.

You know, I had my mother and my father convincing me that he would be going back to Hollywood and he'd be back with the actresses and dating them and that he wasn't serious about me at all. So I had him saying one thing to me and my parents telling me something else.

My father took my mother, me, and my brother from Sicily to New York. He got us one-way tickets but booked himself a return flight. He dumped us with my mother's parents, who had just arrived from Italy, and abandoned us. That was 1986. I didn't see or speak to him for another 12 years. That's cruel.

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

Although my father's mother, Nancy, has dementia, and her experiences gave me ideas for some of the scenes in the book, it was my mother's mother, Vera, who most influenced the character of Maud. Vera died in 2008, before I'd gotten very far into writing 'Elizabeth Is Missing,' but her voice is very like Maud's.

Cyborg was the first superhero that I've ever seen whose parent was around but just was not there for him emotionally, mentally. I related to that in a big way because, growing up, it was my mother and grandmother that raised me and my brother and sisters. I'm the second youngest of five; my father was never in the picture.

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