Early Life
Vanity was born Denise Matthews in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Her mother is of Polish and Jewish descent and was born in Germany while her father was African American, Hawaiian and Native American. Her sister is Canadian model Patricia Matthews. She grew up up in Niagara Falls and came from what she called a "broken home". Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother suffered from alcoholism and depression. Matthews' father was abusive towards her and her sisters. As a child, along with her sisters and step siblings, she regularly moved back and forth between her father and stepmother, mother, and grandparents.
Read more about this topic: Vanity (performer)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Sometimes I think of life as a process where everybody is discouraging and taking everybody else down a peg or two.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)