In several interviews, Octavia Butler has acknowledged that a series of family and life experiences influenced her novel "Kindred". Butler's grandmother had worked chopping sugar cane; she also washed the laundry of her employers. Of course she also did her own housework and laundry for her family. Butler had felt ashamed as a child that her mother worked as a housemaid. She resented her mother for allowing her employers to treat her poorly; in her eyes she felt they talked to her mother as if she were less than a human being. Butler gradually realized that her mother endured all that in order to provide for her family. Butler created female characters in her writing —Alice, Sarah, and Dana—who were heroic in their capacity for endurance and sacrifice in the face of exploitation. Butler drew from her variety of jobs when creating Dana's world as a struggling writer -"from blue collar to low grade white collar, clerk typist". Butler also shows Dana in hard times baking a solitary potato for her daily meal and keeping at her writing, just as she did.