While you may run into Erin and Sara Foster at various high-fashion events, author and songwriter Amy Foster, the only daughter of musicians David Foster and B.J. Cook, can be found navigating the scene at Comic-Cons around the country.
Foster, who’s about to publish the final book in her sci-fi trilogy “The Rift Uprising,” recently told Page Six, “I’m definitely the nerd and no one gets it. My family is always like, ‘What’s up with you and “Star Trek”?’ I’m like, ‘Have you seen “Star Trek”?'”
Much like her family, Foster began her career in the music world. In the early 2000s, her Grammy-winning father gave her 24 hours to write lyrics to a song for an album he was working on.
“I think my dad recognized that I probably wasn’t going to be an artist but that I had the potential to be a pretty good songwriter,” said Foster, 45. “I showed up the next day at Sony Studios where there was, like, a full orchestra. It was Josh Groban’s first album, the song was called ‘Home to Stay,’ and he sang it. And I was like, ‘This is literally the best job ever.’”
She also said of her dad, a famed producer, songwriter and composer, “But when your dad is David Foster, I realized very quickly that people automatically had a lot of ideas about who I was going to be and I needed to learn the craft of songwriting and Los Angeles was not really the place to do it. So I moved to Nashville when I was 29 and spent six or seven years, every day, writing songs and learning how to be a songwriter.”
Since then, she’s written tunes for Michael Bublé and collaborated with Blake Shelton, Destiny’s Child and Andrea Bocelli.
And while Amy, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, still travels to Nashville to work on music, she’s been focused on writing books for the last several years. In 2009, she released her first fiction title, “When Autumn Leaves,” and followed it up with “The Rift Uprising” trilogy, the last of which comes out Oct. 9.
“I was very interested in creating a female warrior that broke the stereotype of what a female warrior has been recently,” she said of her main character, 17-year-old Ryn Whittaker. “Like it seems to me that popular culture has a real problem with our female warriors being both creators and destroyers. I’m not talking about like the unlikely hero trope like Katniss [Everdeen from ‘Hunger Games’], I’m talking about women specifically their archetype is warrior. They were put in a story to fight.”
Citing Black Widow’s sterility and virgin female warriors from mythology, Foster said, “For some reason society has a real problem with this idea of women having full agency and being sexual and also being able to kill you, although it’s something that men do all the time.”
Foster has also been tapped to write a Y.A. novel about Red Sonja, the female heroine in the Conan the Barbarian comic books, from the ages of 17 to 20. She told us that an upcoming film is set to pick up Red Sonja’s story at age 20.
In her spare time, Foster spends time with her family. She has two daughters, Mikaela and Eva, with her first husband, and a son named Vaughn with her current husband of 11 years, Matt Freeman. On top of that, she’s part of one of the biggest family webs in Hollywood that includes the Hadids, the Jenners and the Fujikawas.
Adding to the enormous family tree, David Foster will soon walk down the aisle for the fifth time when he weds “American Idol” alum Katharine McPhee.
“They make an excellent couple,” she said. “And I wasn’t surprised. And I’m just happy when my dad’s happy, and Kat is a really great woman.”
Amy added that it bothers her when people fixate on the 34-year age gap between her father and his future wife.
“It’s sexist to drag Kat and call her a gold digger, which people are doing, and have done, because Kat has a life and she makes her own money,” she said. “She’s incredibly successful on her own terms and in her own way. She doesn’t need David Foster’s name, she doesn’t need his money, she doesn’t need anything from him. They genuinely love each other. It really pisses me off as a feminist when I hear people saying that she’s with my dad because she’s trying to get something.”
One thing is for sure: The Fosters have each other’s backs.