My father never wanted me to be a writer. He didn't - he came to terms with it maybe two years before he died. He wanted me to be a weather girl because when I was growing up, there were very few Latinas on television, and in the early '70s when you first started seeing Latinas on TV, they would be the weather girls.

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

My father always defined my gender to my brothers. He'd say, 'This is your sister; you must take care of her.'

But I deal with this meditating and by understanding I've been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not to overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.

I come from a petit bourgeois family, and I've always been drawn to artists and people who choose their own way of life instead of being chosen by the lives that people want for them.

When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.

My mother was gentle and warm. She was the sort of person you could really open up to. I was the eldest and her only boy, so I guess I was treated differently. She did bring me up as a Catholic, and at one time I was an altar boy, but I lost my faith, as did my father, when my mother died at 45.

I'm the only person in my entire extended family that plays an instrument or sings, really. Which is kind of weird. I don't know where I got it from.