It was definitely my grandmother who introduced me to fashion.
My grandmother was a psychiatrist and possibly the ultimate of all skeptics. But even she couldn’t explain the strange noises we so often heard in the attic.
For the record, my mother is an astonishing and loving grandmother.
After my parents passed away – in 2000 and 2003 – I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Changing a diaper is a lot like getting a present from your grandmother – you’re not sure what you’ve got but you’re pretty sure you’re not going to like it.
My friends would always joke that I’m ‘the grandmother’ and ‘the homebody’ because I can’t stay up past nine o’clock, but a lot of that rest is so important for me.
I was born in Manly Hospital, I pretty much grew up in my grandmother’s house until my parents bought their own home.
Every time I see a cardinal, I know my grandmother is with me. This regal, red bird was Grandma’s favorite.
I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.
I don’t feel like a grandmother. I don’t.
In Quanzhou, I have a lot of influence from superstition. I would go to the temple with my grandmother and mother. That is why I have a lot of curiosity about the unseen force and invisible things.
My grandmother was probably the first person who I thought was beautiful. She was incredibly stylish, she had big hair, big cars. I was probably 3 years old, but she was like a cartoon character.
For any of us in this room today, let’s start out by admitting we’re lucky. We don’t live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited.
I’ve gotten lots of great advice from lots of people that I admire, but the person who influenced me more than anyone in my life was my grandmother.
My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book ‘Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers’ – this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford’s wire hangers look like pool noodles.
Tragedy struck the family when I was 10 days old. My eldest brother was killed in a car accident. He was six. My grandmother survived the incident, but the loss devastated my parents. I think they went into shock for a couple of years.
At one time, when I was eight years old, my mother and father, my brother and my sisters – we had to move back in with my grandmother, and there were 13 of us living in one house.
My grandmother raised me. She was a real no-nonsense but very funny lady. I drove tractors, made hay, milked cows, fed the chicken, fed the pigs.
I’m not drunk onstage, although I’ve done that a couple of times when I was younger. It’s partly just the way I talk – I talk like somebody in a rocking chair. I’m your 150-year-old grandmother.
A lot of people in the African-American community are raised by grandmothers, and that relationship is a special bond and circle.
I grew up with a grandmother from another country and having a different language in my house. That gave me an ear for accents.
I used to call my grandmother ‘Nana,’ so that seems right to me, but maybe I’ll just be ‘Jade’, in that modern way.
My mother read nursery rhymes to me, and my grandmother told me folk stories, but as a child I had no interest in writing whatsoever.
I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that.
I’ve been to the Bahamas. It’s a beautiful country with truly excellent people. When I took a cruise that docked for a couple hours in Nassau, it mostly reminded me of a giant version of my grandmother’s neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama… but with better accents.
AERIN is saturated with the qualities that have surrounded me my entire life, many of which came from my grandmother, Estee: passion, style, hard work, family, and, of course, all things beautiful.
I am from a woman’s family. My great-grandmother had three daughters and a son. My grandmother had two daughters, and my mother had two daughters. My sister had a daughter and then finally a son. You should have seen my father with the son. He could not believe that finally there was a boy in the family.
I spent summers with my mother’s parents in Arkansas, where religion felt very present. My grandmother was Baptist, and my grandfather was Methodist. Double Southern whammy.
My maternal grandmother was a star on her high school basketball team in small-town Mississippi.
There are mothers who sew for six months to make a fashion collection – someone’s grandmother, someone’s sister. We come in and get paid to walk for 10 minutes at the end. Whenever I think about that, I realise it’s not about me. I was just the one chosen to represent those women and sell the clothes.
My grandfather could barely read. My grandmother had a sixth-grade education. They were people who were industrious. They were frugal.
When I think about my late grandmother and how she used to talk to me, I become very emotional.
I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.
I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can’t explain it in five minutes, then it’s too obtuse or esoteric.
As I learned from growing up, you don’t mess with your grandmother.
I found my grandmother dead. It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn’t stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis, and I’m done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it.
I love to watch ‘Hoarders.’ My grandmother was a hoarder. My mother’s on her way. I’m an electronics hoarder – I won’t throw any out. I still have my first T-Mobile Sidekick… old VCRs in my garage. It scares me that I’m going to end up being buried under electronics.
After my grandmother passed away, I felt the urge to take my camera to her flat. I knew this flat from my childhood in Tel Aviv. Going to this flat was like going abroad; there was a real feeling of traveling across Tel Aviv and ending up in Berlin.
I remember Tim Meadows gave me a radio. It was a radio he didn’t want anymore. I gave it to my grandmother, and she had it ’til the day she died. To me, it was, ‘I got a thing from Tim Meadows!’ I think my grandmother was like, ‘I got a thing from my grandson!’
I was my parent’s first child, Joanna Catherine Going, named for my great-great grandmother Catherine, and my father’s maternal aunt Johanna Burke, and bearing the initials of my father’s father, John Christopher, who passed away just months before I was born.
I wanted people to know that my grandmother was the reason why I did comedy in the first place. She pushed me to really get out there and pursue my dreams.
A mother becomes a true grandmother the day she stops noticing the terrible things her children do because she is so enchanted with the wonderful things her grandchildren do.
During a visit to California, when a friend of my grandmother’s told my parents that I must be deaf because I was not responding to sounds, my father was absolutely convinced that I was simply being stubborn.
My entire life, my grandmother told me I could do whatever I set my mind to.
My grandmother wanted my father to be a teacher because she was a teacher. He didn’t go down that road until much later in life; he just kind of retired after almost 20 years as being a visiting lecturer at Stanford, where he got his graduate degree.
My mother gave me a pair of diamond earrings when I was 13. It symbolised becoming a teenager. I also remember getting a collection of costume jewellery from my grandmother when I was in high school.
We have ambitions, we go on with our lives. We get married and have families. But I was interested to know what happens to those girls who become mothers and grandmothers. They sacrificed their self at a time when they were young and healthy.
My grandmother was a huge western fan. She’d have me watch with her. ‘Shane,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘Duel in the Sun,’ I saw them all with her. I used to watch them until the TV turned to snow.
Estee Lauder was my grandmother. She was an iconic and powerful woman, but to us, she was just Estee. She was the first person to teach me how important it is to be passionate and proud of what you do, and always talked about ‘balance.’
My grandmother taught me that accomplishments meant less than what you left behind. I started to ask myself what impact my comedy would have on people’s lives. And that changed my act. I got cleaner. I stopped talking about generic stuff like airplane peanuts and started speaking the truth about my gift.
I was one of six kids; my grandmother lived with us. We had an aunt who used to have nerves, and all her kids would turn up and live with us.
I would write plays for my grandmother, who was stone deaf, my mother and the dog, that was our audience.
I went to NYU Tisch for undergrad, and it was amazing. My life then was extremely experimental with acting. I did crazy theater where we would be rolling around on the floor. I would be playing grandmothers, and clowns, and all this crazy stuff. Then I would be doing Shakespeare eight hours a day.
