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As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale.

I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair.

My neighborhood was like 'The Wonder Years.' We played until 10 o'clock at night. We used to tell scary stories. I was the one scaring them. We used to play football by this place called the Myer's House. It was a big, spooky house with the gables; we'd hang out there and scare each other.

I have two brothers and we basically spent our lives playing in the woods, falling in ponds, getting chased by wasps and riding donkeys that we shouldn't have been riding.

There was always that kind of imagination in our house, which was always a little crazy.

When I was little, there were so many people in my house. Everyone was enjoying themselves, rehearsing, having fun. It was like a playground.

When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.

I remember having mice in the house and my father taking some newspaper and beating me because mice was running on me while I was asleep.

When I was four years old, my father, who was a colonel in the army, was stationed in Salzburg, Austria. Across the street from our house was an ancient castle on a cliff. So when I first heard fairy tales, I felt as if the magic of 'Cinderella' or 'Sleeping Beauty' was taking place right in my own neighborhood.

I found a lot of fairy tales scary. They really didn't sit well with me.