I'm in good shape. My cancer means I have lost a lot of organs and I'm a lot lighter. I have devoted myself to yoga and I'm doing handstands.

I have been a depressed person most of m life. I was always in the throes of self-hatred.

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

I got to a nine-hour surgery, I lost lots of body parts and rearranged, I got really months of infection that I lost 30 pounds. But the idea of pumping poison into my bloodstream just - I couldn't, I couldn't.

I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.

What I have found is that even when you try to transform existing structures they are so powerful they often overwhelm, seduce, and control you.

It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.