When I was growing up in the 1950s, sweaters were a huge thing.

The protests against Harry Potter follow a tradition that has been growing since the early 1980s and often leaves school principals trembling with fear that is then passed down to teachers and librarians.

I was always a storyteller. I just didn't know it. I never shared the stories I made up inside my head when I was growing up. I never wrote them down, either. But I can't remember a time when they weren't there.

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read.

It is draining when you have a child, and there aren't many women directors with kids out there as role models.

I was not from a middle-class family at all. I did not have middle-class possessions and what have you. But I had middle-class parents who gave me what was needed to survive in society.

In my child's-eye view, whenever I was exposed to pain, it meant that my mother had let me down.

Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.