And sometimes we cling because the memory is so painful that we can't stop visiting it and hoping to make it come out differently. The risk of letting go is that we have to confront our own selves and our own possibilities.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

I met Jay Jonhson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team.

All intimacy is rare-that's what makes it precious.

Some people are your family no matter when you find them, and some people are not, even if you are laid, still wet and crumpled, in their arms.

I am interested in the gaps between one piece of sidewalk and the next. I am interested in the things for which we dont always have a name, and the things that are not easy to articulate - the difference between what we think and how we feel.