I loved him even now, as he took a knife to my throat, as I drowned in blood, as I whispered "Cousin, you were wrong. We were born to live.
Your fey cousin here has the miraculous ability to hold his liquor--and mine, and yours, and the king's, and half the country's, I expect.
I think about Chilean literature as a family, because I grew up reading the literature of my country. I feel like I have fathers and stepfathers and a lot of brothers and sisters and distant cousins and all that.
My mother's sister was killed in a trolley car accident, so I was raised as one of eight with my sister and six male cousins.
My family has always had Cape Verdean pride but I don't think it was something the kids in the family necessarily understood. However, I was very conscious of the fact that both sides of my family were drastically different and my aunts, cousins, and uncles varied in different shades of brown.
I've always been an actress, entertaining my family was the start. I'm a goof ball among many of my cousins and siblings.
I come from a huge family and out of all 34 of my immediate family members, my heavier influences were women. Between my grandmothers, aunts, older female cousins, and of course my mother, I was pretty much predominantly raised by women, as they make up most of my family anyway.
From her gospel-singing mother Cissy Houston, her legendary pop-diva cousin Dionne Warwick, and her Queen of Soul godmother Aretha Franklin, she [Whitney Houston] inherited gifts for skillfully interpreting lyrics and endowing them with new depth and jeweled nuance.