I've worked hard on my doctorate, and I want to be acknowledged for that. But I also wanted to comment on this message that women get that the most important thing they can do is police their appearance.

For many years I wrote nothing but "I will not sleep with Steve Almond" over and over again, page after page à la Jack Torrance in The Shining. Finally, hundreds of psychotherapy sessions and an intense shaman-guided DMT sweat lodge experience led to a breakthrough, and I was able to write about other people I would not sleep with, and also about people I would.

If you're a beautiful Caucasian woman, and you commit a heinous crime, it's like people don't want to acknowledge the reality of your actions.

I think humor is like a shield that lets you get as close to the sad sad flame as possible - far closer, oftentimes, than drama.

During my MFA, I was lucky to be surrounded by a really supportive group of peers. And now I get feedback pretty exclusively from freaks only.

Keeping a diary is advanced-level living. I spend way too much time trying not to curl up in the corner like a giant fetus & weep to keep a diary.

It was just such a complete shock to turn on the news one day and see someone that you know, someone you have passed in the halls of your high school. It got me thinking, 'Well, what are some novels that are about female sexual psychopaths? I really didn't have many references for that, and I felt like that was a void in transgressive literature that I wanted to fill.'