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

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.

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

My father deprived me of any truths about himself. He died without ever letting me know who he truly was. I only knew his facades, basically. And it breaks my heart that he never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.

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.

It's important to write like your readers are brilliant.

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