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I grew up in strange circumstances.

I was a child in the sixties, and a teenager in the seventies, so there was a wild burst of excitement going on out there, that evaporated into disco just I was getting to the age where I could have taken part.

When I was seven years old, I watched on TV as we flew a rocket ship to the moon and landed on it and walked around.

We were a bit poor but we didn't think we were.

My father was an unshakeably religious, humble, intelligent, generous, and profoundly honest man. My mother was depressive, and at the same time utterly devoted.

We had good schools. They were run by people chosen because they cared about it and were respected by Anglican priests.

(The public system had two parts, one half run by the Catholic church, and the other run by a council of appointees from the rest; Anglicans were the majority. My dad ran the local board while I was in school.)

We read John Milton and Faulkner and Dickens and Don Marquis and S.E.Hinton, and learned algebra and trigonometry and geometry for proofs, and we learned that Kosciosku is the largest mountain in Australia, and that Buddhists believe in reincarnation and have an elaborate model of the world different from our own.

I had three older sisters, one of them an uptown socialite (it was a small town), one a downtown socialite, and the other a down&out socialite; they rebelled in three different ways, and I watched and wondered what was going on.

We smoked pot like maniacs in high school, it was a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing else nearly so fun to do.

I think that everyone's beginnings are interesting, when you look at them closely. It's lots of context and detail together, that makes things interesting for me.