I love roles where it's not about being perfect or being beautiful, where there is more of an interest in what's going on inside the character.

When I went to school, it was to be an electrical engineer. I graduated with a degree in industrial management and worked in trucking for a couple of years. Then I decided that I was bored with the trucking industry and that I would go back to graduate school.

I have a masters in African-American literature, and I got a Ph.D. in American Literature. I spent a number of years teaching as a professor in the university system. Then I turned forty and decided I was going to be the woman I wanted to be!

I think often we like to talk about the strength of black women, and really, that can become an interesting stereotypical trap - that these women are so strong, that they don't fear anything, they don't need help, and they have no vulnerabilities. Well, that's not a human person! That takes away a lot of the humanity as well.

Her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a contemporary artist, and my stepmother, Cindy Sherman, is a photographer, so they've known each other forever. Lena and I were often at the same dinner parties when we were kids.

During the late '20s my father left us. My mother was in a complete hole with no money, and we were evicted.

The father-mother family with two children isolated in a city flat is already insufficient.

My own interest in Kafka's letter came about when I was writing an article on Peter Ginz, the boy novelist held in Terezin, not far from Prague, and exterminated in Auschwitz by the Nazis. The Ginz family were from more or less the same milieu as the Kafkas.