My mother was a strong, domineering woman, probably scared to death of the position she found herself in She was psychotic, attempting suicide several times and scaring the devil out of me as a kid with threats . . . One day [she] would say that she loved me, and the next day she'd scream that she was sorry I'd ever been born -- that I'd ruined her life . . . [She] would often stuff her mouth with cotton and hold her breath, pretending that she was dead, to scare me when I was small. Sometimes she'd tell me she really could walk and during the night she was going to get up, turn on the gas jets, and kill us both. I would be absolutely terrified . . . And yet . . . she encouraged my writing and would tell me that I was a good kid and she didn't know why she acted that way . . . but then she'd do it again.

Since my mother is the type that's called schizophrenogenic in the literature—she's the one who makes crazy people, crazy children—I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.

She was sweet, but a psycho.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>] is the origin... the ground zero of all of the family dysfunction... I believe that he was a sociopath. ...He had no real human feeling for anybody, including his children, and was quite adept at using people to his own ends; and if he found them not to be of use, he had no compunction about discarding them. ...[H]e enjoyed humiliating other weaker people a great deal.

When she’d been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis. She was a sociopath too. She was happy, because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy, because she had been the only sociopath among us. “We are very rare,” she told me once, “and mostly we are men.”

My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy.

Mother would be in real trouble right now.

That was the only time my mother saw me on stage. At one point in the play I am strangled and my mother jumped from her seat and screamed: 'No. You will not get away with murder. You cannot do this to my daughter.' Friends explained to her that this was not for real — that we were acting. But she made such a fuss. Everyone was so embarrassed. On stage my heart sank.

"So are you saying," Allison asked, "that there's a little bit of sociopath in all of us?"

The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.

My mom has a tendency of flashing.

…I wanted to show that the mother was the heroine as soon as possible. I'm tired of love-sick girls and runaway wives. We'll prove that there's romance in old women also.

My psychosis was acting completely crazy.

I went through the usual stages: imp, rascal, scalawag, whippersnapper. And, of course, after that it's just a small step to full-blown sociopath.