My mother taught public school went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

My humanitarian work evolved from being with my family. My mom my dad they really set a great example for giving back. My mom was a nurse my dad was a school teacher. But my mom did a lot of things for geriatrics and elderly people. She would do home visits for free.

When I was in nursery school the teachers asked me y'know 'What does your dad do for a living?' So I said 'He helps women get pregnant!' They called my mom and they were like 'What exactly does your husband do?'

My dad always used to tell me that if they challenge you to an after-school fight tell them you won't wait-you can kick their ass right now.

One afternoon when I was 9 my dad told me I'd be skipping school the next day. Then we drove 12 hours from Melbourne to Sydney for the Centenary Test a once-in-a-lifetime commemorative cricket match. It was great fun - especially for a kid who was a massive sports fan.

Dad kept us out of school but school comes and goes. Family is forever.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

When I was in school I read a lot of comic books and pretend I was in them and kids would tease me and call me names. But now I do the same things and people say that I'm artistic and cool and I'm doing the exact same thing I did in high school.

I hated the idea of a high school sweetheart. Growing up oh my God it just made me sick. I wanted to have a range of cool boyfriends. I wanted to travel around and date these interesting men. Then it just happened. You fall in love.

You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen comedy actors are maybe juniors and dramatic actors - they're the cool seniors.

I remember in high school trying to get home from water-polo practice in time so I could see Happy Days on television when it first came on because I was so blown away by it. It was just such a cool thing.

I wasn't some weird loner in school but I definitely wasn't invited to any of the cool parties.

When I was in high school my friends and I would drive out into the country to abandoned houses and structures... haha... to ghost hunt. We would scare each other so bad! We would sometimes camp out by the abandoned buildings just to scare ourselves! Such good times. The adrenaline of real fear is so cool!

I went to engineering school which I thought was what I wanted to do for about two weeks. We had an orientation class and we met this guy where he worked and stuff and it was cool but I was like 'There is no way this is going to be my life.'

I used to skip out of high school and go flying. It was just one of those things I thought it was kind of a cool thing to do. I never thought about doing that as a profession but I started checking things out and I found out there was a flight school down in Daytona Beach called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Looking so cool his greed is hard to conceal he's fresh out of law school you gave him a license to steal.

My first three years of high school I wasn't that cool.

I joined MySpace in September 2003. At that time no one was on there at all. I felt like a loser while all the cool kids were at some other school. So I mass e-mailed between 30 000 and 50 000 people and told them to come over. Everybody joined overnight.

See at a certain point it becomes cool to be boy crazy. That happens in sixth grade and it gives you so much social status particularly in an all-girls school if you can go up and talk to boys.

A Christian high school is just like any other high school in the sense of the politics and all of these levels of who's cool and what to wear.

I never really loved school through junior high but then I started running track my freshman year and I was just like 'Wow this is cool!'

Sunday school don't make you cool forever.

And I remember as a second or third grader having some autonomy to go to the store if I felt like it walk home take my time kick the can. We were on our own schedule after school so that was cool.

I definitely wasn't cool in high school. I really wasn't. I did belong to many of the clubs and was in leadership on yearbook and did the musical theater route so I had friends in all areas. But I certainly did not know what to wear did not know how to do my hair all those things.