Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

I had a briefcase at one point, but it was a kind of 1980s New Wave briefcase. It was made of some kind of cardboard and it had metal hinges. It was kind of faux industrial looking, and I used to carry my books in it rather than a backpack. I didn't want to have normal student accoutrements.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

The trees like lungs filling with air. My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.