"I don't think that my children are at all similar to me," Douglas says of his 19-year-old son and his 15-year-old daughter, both of whom were raised in a robust intellectual atmosphere akin to Douglas's own childhood. "I don't think either of them will set the world on fire, nor do they want to. I deeply resent when people say that one of my children will be another blah-blah prizewinner. Even friends say that my kids are going to do wonderful things. The presumption is that there is magic in the genes, or in the name. I shrug and say something like, 'As long as they are happy.'"
"My son is at Indiana University," Douglas says. "Some of his friends want autographed copies of Gödel, Escher, Bach—but he's never read a single thing of mine. My daughter is into fashion and loves to design crazy outfits. I don't usually talk about anything I'm working on. At dinner, we talk about things going on in the world, or we decide who is the funniest person we know, or something like that." The children's mother, Carol—a lover of art, art history, and the Italian language— died of cancer in 1993. Douglas's latest book, I Am a Strange Loop, explores the nature of self-awareness and describes how his late wife's consciousness, in some form, lives on in his mind. The couple's warm relationship set the tone for a family more concerned with people and indulging curiosities than external validation.
