I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories.

Along the way, I've worked as a waitress, I've done phone surveys, and worked as a receptionist, and for the last twenty years I've taught. When I was an actor, the key was to find a job that kept your days free to audition.

The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience.

I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect.

If anything, I've found nonfiction a little easier. You don't have to make anything up. Of course, that's the inherent difficulty as well: when you hit an information black hole, you don't get to make it up. That hasn't come up too often with this project though. I'm lucky to have tons of primary source material , reams of letters and diaries and memoirs.

I just can't fathom tweeting, and I'd rather spend my time writing a book than a blog, but I rather grudgingly agreed to a Facebook page. I had a brief, intense romance with Facebook. It's weirdly addictive, but anything that time-sucking is a danger for a writer who writes as slowly as I do. Now I post only occasionally and nothing very confessional. I think I'm carbon dating myself as I speak.

Practicality continues to be a challenge for me - it's at odds with being an artist. I actually had a career on stage in New York - not a brilliant career or I'd still be doing it - but I got enough work to keep my agent and my union health insurance.