My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.

Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

I live my own life and nurse my own wounds. It's not the best way to live. But it's the way I am.