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I had worked my whole life. Until I became a mother, that's the only way I measured my value.

It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.

I class myself as a manual laborer.

My dad was an autoworker, my mom was a clerk. Until I was thirty-five, I never made more than fifteen thousand dollars a year.

Mom was a housewife; Dad was an accountant. They taught me a lot about the value of working hard.

I worked full time jobs, basically doing manual labor until I could make enough money supporting myself as a musician.

I've been working since I was a child. I worked cutting lawns, delivering newspapers; I was a telephone salesperson; I was a guitar repairman.

I was in constant demand, in my professional life and my personal life.

I did all kinds of things in order to earn a living.

When I was younger, my whole sense of self-worth was based on whether or not I was working, which was awful. And I had a baby at 20 years old, so it wasn't just about me. At around the age of 30 there was a stretch where I wasn't working - certainly not on anything I liked, anyway - and I started to do other things.