I was often the only white girl in the Indian dance class. That felt funny, but doing Indian dance was great.

My father was a doctor. He was just a great guy, a gentle humanist, and an old-fashioned GP. He'd get up at three in the morning to see patients in different areas if they needed him.

I started as a tap dancer in Durban, which is on the coast. That was an important part of growing up, turning on the radio in the morning and hearing Zulu singing or the news in Zulu.

My art history papers were really politics. They were about the manifestation of culture through the eye of political events. So there was always that refusal to settle in one place, or one discipline or medium.

It was very interesting growing up in South Africa then. It was extraordinary. It was multiculturalism before it became an issue.

There's a moment when you say, "Okay, I'm not going to become a dancer. I'm not going to become a painter." So in a sense, I ended up writing about those big conflicts that I felt.

I was often the only white girl in the Indian dance class. That felt funny, but doing Indian dance was great.