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.

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 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.

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.

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've been asked several times since the book Love and Trouble came out, "Are you still sad?" And I'm not, not in the way I was before. I do feel like it was a season in hell that I passed through. But now I'm in despair and sad and confused every day because of our political situation. So the question is: Is it harder or easier to be sad with a reason?

Your sexuality belongs to you, and think about your own desire.