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

I used to consider myself to be a cineophile, and then I had a daughter. Ha! Now I barely see any movies.

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.

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

It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.

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.