Life modelling for a woman who made me recite Shakespeare as I posed. I had a hangover, and it was all a bit much.

When I first got excluded from school at 15, my dad gave me experience as a roofer. That’s when I came to realise I’m scared of heights.

When I was young, selling maps to stars’ homes in Hollywood, somebody flashed their wiener at me. It was traumatising.

When I was 17 I took on a class of six-year-olds for a week. When the Angelus rang at noon, they stood up in silence and I realised I was supposed to recite the prayer, which I did not know. I said: “There will be no Angelus today because of that child fidgeting at the back.”

Sometimes when I’m on a plane, as I often am, the weather is rough and we’re worried about going down. I think: If I hold the hand of the person next to me, I’ll be holding everyone’s hand. Like my dear friend, the late Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, I want to know: I’m going to the other side of the mountain.

I’m walking down a street in New York, the sun is shining, I’m on my way to see friends who are chosen family—and I’ve just written a couple of pages that I like.

As someone who left the world around me a little kinder and less hierarchical.

Feeling you want someone else’s welfare as much and sometimes more than your own.

In my 30s, I was staring at a pair of expensive boots in a shop window when the photographer Gordon Parks came up behind me. He instantly understood, because he grew up even poorer than me; he made me buy them on my credit card.

Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.