Yes, things happened to me - brutal things - but I'm not going to give them so much clout by dwelling on them, empowering them to haunt my heart years after the events transpired. And no good comes from that. These ghosts don't need us to help them stay alive. If we're after real deal healing, these ghosts must desiccate.

I'm a very tactile learner, so I need analog index cards, moving them all about, trying out various sequences for the book's architecture.

It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.

I always joke that every novel is really about the same thing: one person's struggle against society.

My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.

In my life the right question is simply this: What can I do to be happy today?

Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.