From an article on Salon.com:

[Homeschooling] struck a chord with Leslie in several different ways. She’s a hardcore nonconformist — yeah, she’s a lifelong lefty, but one closer to anarchism than socialism — and home schooling dovetailed perfectly with a bunch of other DIY interests she’s developed in recent years. She tends a large vegetable and flower garden every summer at a family house in central New York state, where Desmond and Nini help her grow peas, beans, lettuce, carrots, pumpkins and enormous sunflowers. In the basement she has a workshop where she makes furniture out of recycled wood and fallen branches, and she hoards piles of sewing projects for the cold winter months. Her interest in unconventional education goes back to her beloved grandmother, a renegade schoolteacher in an Indiana small town who gave her a copy of A.S. Neill’s legendary “Summerhill School” more than 30 years ago. Compared with all that, public school never had much chance.