Nancy Werlin Quotes

The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was.

'Fall on Your Knees' is really a story about secrets and family, and the idea that there are some stories or truths that need to be expressed.

'Family Secrets' is thought provoking, well written, and remorselessly intelligent.

Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

I can see how the young girls really get hurt when their moms are critical, or vice versa when they're overly critical of their moms. It can be so painful.

I think that it would be hard to find a family that didn't have a secret in it somewhere, and sometimes we know about them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we have an inkling that there's something hidden, but I think that it touches everybody's life.

The first half of our lives are ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.

The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.

Generally if you're a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.

I think family skeletons are best left where they are-- in the closet

I was a huge fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's novel 'Maine,' and like that novel, 'Saint' is a family saga set in Boston. Irish Catholic family secrets - is there anything better?

'The Man Who Loved Children,' Christina Stead's masterpiece, remains the most fabulous book that hardly anyone I know has read.

People feel very ashamed to admit that they have in-law problems. They think it's something petty. But it's not petty at all. It hits deep emotions.

Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.

Who was I, really? I was the sole occupant of my mother's totalitarian state, my own personal history rewritten to fit the story she was telling that day. There were so many missing pieces. I was starting to find some of them, working my way upriver, collecting a secret cache of broken memories in a shoebox.

Until late in life, I was never quite good enough for my father, and I suppose that is part of what drives me even now, well after his death in 1992.

I had my footballing heroes such as Bryan Robson and Diego Maradona but my dad was a rugby league star, and he was my real hero. But the relationship with my mum was rocky and we saw things that would affect any youngster.

I finally did work out a very good relationship with my father, but it was rough growing up. We had a lot of conflict, and I think it surfaced in many of my works.

I think there's a tremendous amount of guilt that goes on between mothers and daughters, no matter how good or bad their relationships are.

Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

While I'm generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn.

Family relationships trigger childhood wounds, and those wounds often trump our rational thinking. We can't 'rationally' transcend the kind of primal pain that such relationships can arouse.

I found out when I was 18 that Dad had left my mother and the family before he realised he was ill and then died. When I asked Mum about it, she just sort of shrugged it off and said she'd thought I knew about it all along. Of course I hadn't, though I'm sure she must have been desperately unhappy at the time.

'Peeples' is definitely not 'Meet the Parents'. It's more a movie about family secrets. It does explore class issues somewhat, but it's mostly about living your own truth.

I knew that there was a great deal of depth and life that was sitting just beyond my mother's gaze.