I must have got my detailed, obsessive streak from my father, who was an English teacher, because my mother wasn't like me at all.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was 23 years old, a freshman at university, and there I was, on the first day, sitting in a remedial English class. I was so ashamed I almost got up and left, but somehow I knew inside that if I ran away from this, I would hate myself forever.
The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.
I was a terrible English student.
I was very wary of repeating my father's behaviour and did everything not to act like he did.
I could never have a better teacher in those days than my father.
My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.
My dad was an English professor.
I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.
My mother was a teacher.