My dad was a movie star. Having that name was good and bad. People think it’s a silver spoon. It’s not.
I grew up in Alaska, okay? My dad graduated high school and went straight to the mountains. He had $300 and staked a claim. He didn’t even have enough to put a title on the land: just had the records that he bought before he moved.
When you’re growing up, your dad is your superhero. Once you’ve let yourself fall that in love with someone, once you put him on such a high pedestal and he lets you down, you never want to experience that pain again.
I’ll back up anything my dad says.
At a young age, I was introduced to Joni Mitchell by my mum. My dad was into progressive rock.
My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains… it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.
When I was younger, my dad taught me how to cook. He’s a genius in the kitchen. I went to Vietnam with my parents, and I went on a cooking course with him.
I was born in India, and we came from a poor family and lived in a rural village. My dad came over to Canada as a refugee, and years later, we were able to join him.
My dad was in the RAF, so we travelled quite a lot. My memory’s not the best – I remember we lived in Belgium for a bit – but I grew up in a village called Compton in Newbury.
My mom and my dad were both very sociable, meeting lots of interesting people.
My dad’s white, my mom’s black, and I’ve struggled with being mixed race.
I grew up in Birmingham, but my parents are originally from Barbados. My dad, Romeo, was a long-distance lorry driver, and my mother, Mayleen, worked in catering.
Thank God I have parents who’d support the crazy things I did. If my dad found a snake, I’d take it to the woods. I was always taking these homeless birds and homeless cats home.
My dad’s a Jew, and my mom’s a WASP, so that should pretty much say it all. It was a comically dysfunctional family.
My dad was an English professor.
My dad and mom did what a lot of parents did at the time. They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure their children were educated.
I am political. But not politically active. I’m not my dad. I’ll never write polemic, as he did.
But my dad also was a remarkable man, a good person, a principled individual, a man of integrity.
My Dad was my biggest supporter. He never put pressure on me.
I have never been jealous. Not even when my dad finished fifth grade a year before I did.
My mum is the biggest Joni Mitchell fan, and my dad loves Neil Young.
Among my dad’s generation, when you gave another man a pocketknife as a gift, it was a show of respect. I’ll still give someone the knife out of my pocket.
I don’t have the privilege of time to meet everyone all the time. But, I’ve always said that my dad is one of the most important people in my universe, and if someone’s important to him, I respect that person.
My mom and dad, although they may not have had a lot of formal education, they were two of the most brilliant people that I know.
It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.
