I think we need to teach pleasure. What beautiful touch means. What reciprocity means. What being connected and what intimacy means. Boys get out there at a young age and the performance posturing is so great and ends up being hard and aggressive.

You know I think so many of us live outside our bodies. My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.

It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.

I think about Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing.' What a radical idea that sex was healing. I learned my politics through that music.

Three of the ten principles governing the City of Joy are (a) tell the truth, (b) stop waiting to be rescued, and (c) give away what you want the most.

But my body was telling its story. I have read a lot of stuff about cancer. I needed this book. I wish I'd had this book when I had cancer. I wanted someone to be talking to me about "fart floors." I wanted somebody telling me what it was like to have a colostomy bag. I felt so alone. And if you're a person who's been traumatized by past abuse, it's so potentially re-traumatizing. You slip right into "oh my god, this is the only person this has happened to before" mentality: "I'm especially bad and I have especially bad cancer..."