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When I was 13 or 14, my parents had a bit of a windfall so bought a lovely new kitchen, but I burnt it down. I was making cheese on toast when flames escaped from the grill. My father stopped the fire with blind panic and excessive water. I was forgiven, but it put me off cooking for years.

I saw my hometown burning that day.

I was literally the black sheep of the family, and there were definitely moments of discomfort while my grandmother was working through her racism.

My brother and sister had a much worse childhood, I think, because they were older, and they had to deal with a lot more racism because they grew up in the '70s and I grew up more in the '80s. So they had to deal with crosses being burned on their lawn and their dogs being poisoned.

For my own part, once I became a teenager, I experienced severe and violent racism.

One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

The day I was born, my house burnt down; the day I left home, the Twin Towers burnt down; and I lived in a jungle in India at 15.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.