Are you kidding? I think they'd rather kill someone than do anything like that. I lived in a town called New Canaan, which is just outside of Connecticut, where they are far too snobby to even mention celebrities. Many American towns are famous for things like, "See the World's Largest Ball of String!" I think my town's would probably have to be "Most Pretentious People".

Now that you are getting recognised more, have you received any weird fan mail?

Right after Under Siege 2, when I was still in high school, a guy sent me bunches of purple roses for weeks. He'd found out where I lived, and sent them to my house - with a note attached: "Just trying to get your attention". I wrote it off as being kind of creepy, but then I went to Arizona for a book signing, and he followed me there. When he revealed he was the man who'd been sending them, that was when my mother decided it was getting a little too scary, and got his name down.

Did you get yourself tooled up for protection? We all know every American schoolkid is packing heat...

FHM often celebrates timeless bullying techniques, such as the Smudgie in our Reporter section. Did you encounter a richer form of intimidation?

I remember one specific bullying method called dipping. A lot of the older guys used to chew great wads of tobacco in the lips, and then spit the juice into Snapple bottles. They fooled this new girl that it was her Snapple, and she took a huge swig. She drank most of it before she realised.

So you didn't get involved in any teenage shenanigans yourself? 

Not really - but as there is categorically nothing to do in New Canaan, everyone got up to something. The worst thing I did was to my high school boyfriend's house. We toilet-papered the trees, and then we got these bags of plastic forks, and stuck them in the ground. As it was winter, the ground froze over by morning, and the forks were stuck; if you tried to pull them out, they broke. We really went for it - so my boyfriend woke up to find his entire front lawn covered in a tiny white forest of forks. He threatened to call the police, actually - but he had no proof.

So that was the end of that relationship, then?

Oh yeah - he thought he could get me to confess. But that wasn't going to happen.