I loved growing up in New York, but I get a lot of questions, like, How did that work? How did you turn out normal? How is that possible? I know New York is crazy and fast paced, but I always associate it with my family and what I know. I remember my ex-boyfriend told me that when he moved to New York from a town in Connecticut, it took him a while to get used to the pace. I was like, “What? People walk way too slowly for me everywhere else.”
I was really lucky growing up—in the back of our house there was this big shared garden, which you just don’t really get in New York City. All of the houses that are on Macdougal and Sullivan Streets line up against it. And I remember on Halloween, when all my friends who lived in apartment buildings would go up and down the elevator, we had a real neighborhood feel for trick-or-treating, and we would go from house to house. The PETA people were never very kind to my mother, though, and would throw paint on our house—on our doorstep.