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.

My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.

I'll never be the sort of author who sells that many copies. You'll never see a book of mine being sold on a table at Costco, between the extra-large jorts and a barrel of salsa. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I'll be indie till I die.

No matter what we've done, no matter the disappointments and sullied blunders, today is the opportunity to do right by ourselves.

I always feel that as the author, once I know what a character is ashamed of, then I can go about making her truthful on the page.

I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.

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