JANUARY 1976: I experience my first snow in San Francisco. My mother, my brother, my father and I drive up onto a mountain together. We have a purple sand-mould with us, an octopus. We use it to make snow figures on the bonnet of the car and are thrilled when they fall off going round corners.

MAY 1976: My father boards a plane. The engines fail. Everyone on board dies.

AUGUST 1979: I start school. Our class teacher is male, which is very important to me. My mother has made my school cone for the first day herself. It looks like me.

NOVEMBER 1989: The wall comes down. My brother listens to the radio a lot around this time and is the first to find out. The next day I'm sitting next to him on a train to Berlin.

APRIL 1993: I move in with my best friend in Cologne – I am an assistant director at the theatre, we live off horrendously little money and are happy.

OCTOBER 1997: I am awarded a place at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. Everyone else is pleased. I cry because I didn't really want to go to Vienna.

SEPTEMBER 2001: I am sitting in an Irish pub in Vienna waiting for a friend who is an assistant designer. I am incredibly proud to be working at the Burgtheater and don't understand why the people around me keep staring at the clouds of smoke on television. A few days later my mother visits Vienna and gives me my first TV set.

DECEMBER 2002: I go away for New Year with my future husband. Everything is still awkward and new. We have no idea that it will become serious.

JANUARY 2006: I have handed in my doctoral thesis and got my first job as a dramaturge at a theatre. It's the first time that I don't really know what I want with my life.

AUGUST 2011: Although we've only just split up, he proposes to me on the phone. I say yes.