Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

In a way women are fleshier because of estrogen. It's hard for us to lose weight because when we get super skinny we don't ovulate. Women in camps during the Holocaust didn't menstruate and didn't ovulate. They were starving; they were terrified. Why emulate that condition? It's nonsensical to me.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

People are terrified. A lot of them are in relationships that aren't satisfying, and if you tell them they can change their life, they get really scared.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.

Writers are doubters, compulsives, self-flagellants. The torture only stops for brief moments.