Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.
I always loved my mother, felt loved, but she was judgmental. Her father in Ireland didn't approve of women generally, and she took on his values. She believed her own mother was foolish.
A part of me wants to sort of try and sound cool and feed this myth that I'm some sort of glamorous lothario, but I was raised by women - my mother and her mother and my aunts - and as a result, most of my friends have always been women.
The world of women fascinates me, probably because my sister and I were always together as children in our mother's salon after school and after ballet classes. We used to talk about what we saw: the different ladies who would come in, all with their distinctive personalities.
I live in Paris, a city where you have a lot of stylish women, so I learned a lot by observing the women in the street. But my mother was always a big influence as well; she is always very feminine in high heels and perfectly cut dresses, with perfect makeup but never too much.
No election is ever just about one issue, but I care a lot about women's rights and making sure parents have what they need to raise healthy kids. I always have cared, but having just had a child, I know how serious it is to be a mother. It's an incredibly huge challenge. You need support. You need resources.
'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous.