I sometimes wonder if the tragedies my family has suffered are a kind of karmic price for all the fame and fortune the Bee Gees have had.

I'd be a liar if I said I had a normal family.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father mother children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity my father who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother's father who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.

I want to deal with somebody who comes from another country to the United States and has a family that comes. I don't care if it's a black family from Jamaica or a Hispanic family from Mexico. These issues need to be dealt with but they need to be dealt with in the entertaining way.

My family truly believes they are better cooks than I am. They see me as Giada not as a celebrity chef. To them I'm just me - their granddaughter niece etc. and they're older and wiser. I like that because it keeps you grounded.

The summer before I went to culinary school my family wanted me to take a job on a movie to make sure that I was making the right decision. I think they hoped I would change my mind about culinary school.

Because I didn't have brothers I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family so I became one of them - but it was not my family.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years to San Francisco for one year Connecticut for seven Oregon for a couple years and then I went to school.