Growing up, she said, “I wanted order so badly. Everyone was like, ‘What a dork!’ and I would say, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be nice to know that one thing was going to be consistent?'”
Meanwhile, Ritter demanded perfection, his own and others, and would warn his younger siblings that there were consequences to their actions. “It wasn’t even something that my dad or mom instilled in me, but I did have this sense that people knew who my dad was and I could embarrass him, or I could bring shame upon the family, or whatever,” he shared on the April 8, 2019, episode of the podcast Really Famous. “That I could mess up and it wouldn’t just affect me, it would affect him and my mom and make them out to be bad parents. There was a level of ‘I better behave’ at a certain point.”
As for his own familiarly human foibles, including overdoing it enough with alcohol that he was inspired to get sober more than eight years ago, “the recklessness came from being so tightly wound,” he mused to Really Famous host Kara Mayer Robinson. Looking back, he said, “as I grew up I really had to not only let go of trying to be perfect but also not rail against perfection so hard that I become an awful nightmare.”