I was born in 1968, just eighteen months after my sister Chrisse and just one year after Dad passed the bar exam.

My dad was an editor and a writer, and that's actually what I aspired to be.

Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm.

I have great faith that Heaven's there and I'll see my brothers and my mom and dad when I get there.

When I was 7, my dad asked his friend to teach me. I played my first tournament competition when I was 8. I remember I shot around 125.

If a dad does his job, we don't need prisons, we don't need jails. That's what I saw growing up.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

My dad was working abroad, in Iraq, and he was a doctor. We used to go and visit him, in Baghdad, off and on. For the first ten years of my life, we used to go backwards and forwards to Baghdad, so that was quite amazing. I spent a lot of time traveling around the Middle East.

I stayed in Baghdad every summer until I was 14. My dad's sister is still there, but many of my relatives have managed to get out. People forget that there are still people there who are not radicalized in any particular direction, trying to live normal lives in a very difficult situation.

My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young, and growing up in a family where the head of the household wasn't a man made a big difference.