My childhood at Graceland. And after having all my children.

When I am painting.

Flying over the Australian outback in a jet, looking down at the incredible orange scenery, the uninhabited hills and gullies, listening to Tchaikovsky on my headphones and drinking champagne with a cigarette in my hand. It was 1984, I'd been to the Adelaide Book Festival and was going back to my husband and my children.

Technically, Ibiza 1990, because of the amount of ecstasy I’d taken.

When my dog died a couple of years ago. We were in Greece on vacation and a friend was watching her at home, and she was bitten by a snake. We rushed home, but we were too late by a few hours.

On a personal level, the friend who is a single mum raising two kids by herself during this Covid era. She is a real hero. If a historical personality, I choose Mikhail Gorbachev, who probably saved the world from world war three.

I was almost run over by a bus when I was 13. And in 1991, in the Gulf war, an Iraqi missile hit close to my house.

I would like to come out at 16 or 17, and not 21.

When I was 16, at the beginning of the summer vacation, I worked in a factory that made industrial valves and I was a much worse industrial valve producer than historian.

That I still don’t understand life. When I was young, I thought at some point I would find somebody who does. I am 45, and there is a good chance that I’ll never meet somebody like that.