As the youngest of 14 children, Dion grew up wearing hand-me-downs and sharing a bed with several sisters. As a baby, she slept in a drawer to save on a crib. She was bullied at school and called "Vampire", owing to her teeth and skinny frame. Local tabloids even dubbed her "Canine Dion" in the teenage years of her career. She often spoke of running home from school to play music in the basement with her brothers and sisters. "I detested school", she would later write in her autobiography. "I had always lived surrounded by adults and children a lot older than me. I learned everything I needed to know from them. As far as I was concerned, real life existed around them." Dion's eldest sister was already in her twenties, married, and pregnant with her first child at the time Dion's mother, Thérèse, was pregnant with Celine.