If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.