It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.

I don't know why this is, but I really believe that things don't happen when we're trying to will them into being. They don't happen when we're waiting for the phone to ring, or the email to pop up in our in box. They don't happen when we're gripping too tightly. They happen - if they happen at all - when we've fully let go of the results. And, perhaps, when we're ready.

I don't want to lean back into the past, or forward into the future. I don't want to wish the present moment away.

I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]

I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.

I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.