Julia Sweeney

They all live together in this convent.

And this particular convent for my high school seemed very... I just wanted to move in.

That seemed like a much better future than the future of having lots of kids.

Although I think that's a perfectly wonderful future for someone now.

But at the time, they were the feminists.

And I still see many of the nuns that way.

I really do admire the nun lifestyle.

You've described growing up in Spokane as something like a Norman Rockwell painting.

You were the oldest of five children in a devout, tight-knit Catholic household.

You said that your family did everything as a gang.

What were the kinds of things you were all doing together?

Well, I have to say, this is fun for me to remember because my mom, as we all do, changed personalities over the years.

And my best memories of her are when I was really young and there were five little kids and she would take us out like strawberry gathering and do a whole strawberry with shortcake and whipped cream thing in the kitchen.

Or she really loved the chaos of little kids, especially before they could question anything that she was doing, which, you know, I'm sympathetic with.

And, yeah, and we laughed a lot.

It was a lot of laughter in the young household.

Before the drugs and alcohol really got a foothold in the family, I would say there was a lot of us all in the car together, all going out over to grandma's, all going out.

We used to go out to the cemetery a lot and sit amongst all the graves.

It was almost like kind of the Mexican tradition of doing that, but we were Irish Catholics, but we...

That was just a destination, the cemetery.