My tunnel vision allows me to have a longer work day than most writers. I'm thankful for that.

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 struggle with staying clean every day, and what really keeps me from doing something stupid is my daughter.

The question why, at least in my life, often leads to despair. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't someone who claimed to love me treat me with respect, compassion, kindness? Etc. These questions never have answers. They are an ocean, and you'll never swim to the other side. Eventually, you'll tire and die.

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.

The point of reading is to inhabit a consciousness that doesn't belong to the reader, immersing yourself in a life that's wholly realized. And a huge facet of our psychic and existential make-ups is the things we're not proud of, things we didn't ask to experience, the scenarios we flubbed.

For the book to succeed, it has to have equal parts ugliness and beauty, counterpoints adding up to emotional complexity. To me, there's a dignity in letting your art be emotionally complex.