Nick Flynn is another writer I admire - his fragmented sections, his playfulness with genre, his urgency. The palette in his work is his style, a voice that is singular, and that's what I think writers should strive for, to have a style and a voice that is only theirs.

How long do we live in the fictions of our past? And how do we convince anyone that who we write is not necessarily who we are?

It's been very jarring for me to stand in public and read about myself and my daughter and her father. I feel like I'm reading someone else's story, and I feel like I've lost something, too, in the writing of self, as if I'm standing and reading myself, as a stranger, to other strangers.

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives.

When I admire a writer, it's for the recognizable palette - Hemingway's minimalism, the dialogue, those isolated bar scenes. But with each story or novel, he shows me something different within the framework he's built - like noticing that there's a chair in the corner I didn't see in another story.

I like to think about the genre, the essay or the memoir, as much as I enjoy writing within its fluid parameters. And teaching allows me to think about it, to articulate it, and to explore it.

One of my friends who writes novels says that once the book is published, it's a separate thing from you; it becomes its own. I feel that way when I read - and that applies to the experience of reading my work in public, too. The essays are a barrier between me and the audience, and it feels like a disappearing act. Poof! I'm gone, and the woman I've created on the page emerges.