My mother's incredible diaries, which she'd written from when she was 21, and even before that. She fell in love with my father when she was 12.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I was very little my mother would read to me in bed. She gave me a fascination for stories, and for the music in words.
Mom was so funny and loving to us kids. She was our first audience. When my dad died, I was suddenly alone in the house with her because my two older brothers were away at college. I was the man of the house, and she was the grieving woman.
Growing up, I had a very happy childhood, with two parents who are still very much together.
I come from a family of storytellers. Growing up, my father would make up these stories about how he and my mother met and fell in love, and my mother would tell me these elaborately visual stories of growing up as a kid in New York, and I was always so enrapt.
What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.
My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.
One of my clearest, happiest memories is of myself at fourteen, sitting up in bed, being handed a large glass of warm buttermilk by my mother because I had a sore throat, and she saying how envious she was that I was reading 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the first time.
My mother was the love of my life.
My original inspiration was my mom: a few years after the death of my dad, she started dating one my teachers!
When my mother had four girls, and she could tell her marriage was falling apart, she went back to college and got her degree in music and education.