Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people working really hard and pleasing people which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.

And I come here as a daughter raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me.

Children that are raised in a home with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who come from divorced or step-parent single-parent cohabiting homes.

There's really no point in having children if you're not going to be home enough to father them.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it's passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town in a very modest home are just the things that I believe have won the election.

My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home that for them was the capital of the world.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow I would look back on all the pleasures excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness not my miscarriages or my father leaving home but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

My father was my main influence. He was a preacher but he was also a history and political science teacher and since he was my hero I wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a teacher.

Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history for instance because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.

It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.