I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

I can't write what I don't believe in.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.