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.

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

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?

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.

Drinking and drugging make it so your reality flies away from you. Your body and your mind are not present. I loved that feeling as a kid. For me, the strongest way to have that feeling was love and sex. Not only did I enjoy it - that feeling of being transported - but because I was so boy-identified, first as a tomboy and then as a girl who liked to sleep with boys.