Fame & Fortune: Author Carol Higgins Clark Follows mom's lead in career and investments
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Bankrate: What kind of childhood did you have?

Carol Higgins Clark: My father died when I was 8, and my mother had five children ages 5 to 13 and she had to commute to work in the city. This was a time when not that many mothers worked. As my mother would say, "We could be broke, but we weren't poor." She was struggling to raise five kids on a salary and be a mother and a father. We didn't grow up with her being a famous author, that's for sure. I worked at the dry cleaners and lumber store and bakery. I was a good student. I was in the National Honor Society, that kind of thing.

Bankrate: How did you become involved in what has become the family business?

Carol Higgins Clark: Around our dining room table growing up, everyone was always fighting to be heard. If you started telling a boring story, you were cut off; there wasn't this pleasant, polite listening to someone drone on and on. There was always sparring back and forth. When I was in college, I would sit at the kitchen table while she was at work and retype the book for her and ended up talking to her about the character and the plot. I did that for a number of books when I got out of college and that's what got me into writing.

Bankrate: You originally had your sights set on being an actress, right?

Carol Higgins Clark: Yes, when I got out of college, I started studying acting and was working for my mother. I still do some acting; it's just that the books take up a lot of time now. I love doing the acting and love doing comedy, and when I started writing, that's what came out. My mother writes the scary books and I write ... one reviewer said she goes for the jugular and I go for the funny bone. Luckily, I was successful in writing the books, but I do want to get more into the acting, to try to do both because it's really fun to do.

Bankrate: It must come in handy when you do the audiobooks. Not many novelists do their own.

Carol Higgins Clark: I went to Hollywood to do my mother's books on tape -- this was before the publishers had their own audio sections -- and someone said, "You should try writing. You've worked with your mother." I studied at the Beverly Hills Playhouse under (playhouse founder) Milton Katselas. George Clooney had just left my class when I got there. And the acting background helps a lot as a writer, because in acting class you're taught everything, sense memory. All that training helps as a writer, and then when you bring scenes into class, you're the director, producer, everything, and then you're critiqued. That training helped me a lot. In New York, I took a class and did some scenes with Matthew Modine.