PG: It’s funny. When people hear you’re Diana Ross’s daughter, they probably start fantasizing about living in castles with Michael Jackson on speed dial. But when you were born, your mom was probably just 10 years from the ragged edge herself.

TER: They have fantasies about what’s happening in our world right now. But my mother is an international treasure, and royalty in the black community, because she did something that didn’t exist at a time when it didn’t happen. She paved her own road. And being her daughter, people loved me just because I was part of her. But from a very young age, I wanted to fill that space with something that was worthy of being looked at.

EW: I love that. You saw you had opportunity, but rather than just saying “Lucky me,” you said, “What can I do with it that expands opportunity for others?”

TER: That was the deal for me.

PG: Was the tenuousness of your lives as girls, whether material or emotional, what sent you into the world with such gusto? Go get it!

EW: No, no, no. It’s the other way around. It’s fragile. Security is something you can work for, but in our family, it was elusive. So the way I internalized it as a child was to see that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. There were times Daddy had a salary, and we were O.K. And then Daddy had a heart attack, and it all turned upside-down: no money coming in, the bills stacking up, we lose the family car.