Drinking and taking drugs. I think there was also a sort of druggie or trance-like nature to the way that I used sex as a child.

The patchwork nature of the forms are a reflection of sexuality itself.

When I was really sad, I would be like a little kid wiggling a loose tooth or touching a sore spot - there were things that I did to make myself sadder. It was almost as if I were luxuriant in my own melancholy. Looking at the diaries and thinking about my old self, thinking about my lost youth - that was part of that project of making myself totally miserable.

The book Love and Trouble is asserting that sexuality lives inside us, and in the culture, and in the people who do things to us - and the forms reflect that.

Drinking and taking drugs. I think there was also a sort of druggie or trance-like nature to the way that I used sex as a child.

I wish I would have been more of a maker. I wish I would have been more of a writer. I wish I would have not subsumed my will to every boy I had a passing fancy about. That's the part that is horrifying.

I think that what I knew as a teenager, and what I rediscovered in my mid-forties, was - aside from the primacy of sexual desire and how strongly it rules me - this idea that we are lucky to feel something. Even if that something is sadness.