Bill Hayes Writer and photographer, 56, single.
My parents, John and Jean, met on a blind date in New York. My mother, an artist, was living there, and my father was a cadet at the military academy. They moved to their shared hometown of Minneapolis, where they married and had six kids in nine years.
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With the aid of an inheritance, my father bought a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Washington state, so when I was three, we moved to Spokane.
I was very close to my maternal grandmother, Helen. She was a significant part of my life from the age of 11 until I left home to attend Santa Clara University, California.
At Christmas time, my grandmother would spend days making chocolates and caramels as gifts for family and friends. Each sweet was individually wrapped in wax paper and put in a tin. When I reflect on it now, it seems so unusual, and so beautiful. I still have recipes for some of her baked goods and pies.
Having five sisters – four older, one younger – connected me to my femininity. My grandmother, mother and siblings were exactly the right moderating influence to the heavily masculine presence of my father.
He was a paratrooper in the Korean War, during which he was blinded in one eye. Once back in America and recovered, he convinced his superiors to return him to duty as he loved parachuting. He is 92 now and has dementia. He's quite a character, my father; he's from a different era.
The basement of our house was devoted to my mother's artistic projects. One of the most significant things she did was get together with some mums in Spokane and start an art school. They got working artists in the area to come to teach, and at the beginning it was free. I took every class and learnt how to develop and print film.
With my 13th birthday money, my mother and I went to a pawn shop and I bought an old 35mm camera. I was drawn to taking pictures of people, like the ones I take in New York today.
My mother was an artist, but foremost she was a mum. She loved raising kids and always said she would have liked six more.
When she passed away in 2011, her health problems included some dementia. I feel like I said goodbye to her a long time before her death. She gave me her middle name, Brooke, so I feel she is very much a part of me.
For many writers, it is the college years that have the biggest impact, but for me the most impressionable time in my life was my high school years.
Joni Mitchell was my first female crush. I was 10 when my oldest sister, Barbara, bought her album Blue. I was taken by the beauty of the music, the lyrics and, most importantly, the arresting cover art.
I bought Joan Didion's A Book of Common Prayer at the B. Dalton bookstore in Spokane when I was 16. I felt this connection to her voice, her perspective and her style of writing. It was like she was communicating directly with me. Again, it was the whole package: an elegantly designed book, and very spare. Some years later, I watched Joan being interviewed in San Francisco. Afterwards, I queued so I could get Common Prayer signed. In person, Joan was tiny, frail and sweet.
Yvonne Higgins was my girlfriend in high school, and we are still in touch. She's a poet and came to my recent book reading in Seattle. It was an important relationship because we were both aspiring writers. I also had a girlfriend at college who was artistic and beautiful.
I've had relationships with women while understanding I was attracted to men. There was experimentation in both categories but, ultimately, being gay held the stronger appeal and gave me a clearer sense of my identity.
I met Björk through my partner of six years, Oliver Sacks. He'd appeared in her documentary, When Björk Met Attenborough, where he discussed the effects of music on the brain. It's hard to imagine two people less alike; Oliver was this quirky, shy neurologist who almost seemed from the 19th century, and she was like she'd come from the future. But they had a special bond.
Oliver and I took a trip to Iceland in 2012. Björk invited us for lunch at her home in Reykjavik. She was so gracious, and served baked trout and a homemade pie. She came to visit Oliver in New York, maybe two months before he died in 2015. She had a deep respect for him and paid those respects before his death, which was beautiful.
Women have been so important in my life: my mother, my sisters, my friends and my agent, Nancy Miller, to whom my book Insomniac City is dedicated. Nancy has been supportive of me from the beginning. There are also women I don't know who are important to me, like Diane Arbus and Susan Sontag. I've always found powerful women who are self-possessed, with singular voices and vision, attractive.
Insomniac City (Bloomsbury) is out now. Bill Hayes will be speaking at the Sydney Writers' Festival, May 22-28; swf.org.au.