I have to keep healthy; otherwise, I jeopardise my career.

I look back and wonder why I wasted my time talking about fried potatoes with the great John Lennon. But that's what was so fabulous about him - he was very down to earth.

I was the youngest of three kids, and from the age of four, singing was my way of getting attention.

Being the youngest, I was a bit of a daddy's girl and sought attention from an early age by singing. I don't know where I got my voice, but ours was always a musical house.

There is nothing wrong with making money, but it was just not in my family's habits to know how to do that. All we knew how to do was work, and we usually liked the work we did.

I went out on the road when I was 12 years old, playing with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers. That was the summer of 1972. We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, George Wallace campaign rallies and bluegrass festivals. As a kid, I had grown up watching quartets that were very entertaining.

As a child, I had always wanted to know what lay at the end of a corridor or behind a door in a picture, so I did a floorplan and elevations of Angelina's house and learned my way around it. The idea was that children should start to feel at home in it.

My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.