I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

I have lovely memories of Los Angeles in the 1930s. I came down to live with my mother's cousin and they invited me to come and go to junior college for a year.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

I know I'm talented, but I wasn't put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it's not where it begins and ends.

I am grateful every morning I wake up. I've a big family full of kids, who laugh all the time and love each other.

Influences at home, including classical music, were not all specifically jazz, but the family radio was always on... So there was always some connection to American culture, to American music.

I think illness is a family journey, no matter what the outcome. Everybody has to be allowed to process it and mourn and deal with it in their own way.