I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

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

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.