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

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.

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

We have today and hopefully tomorrow to be the best version of 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.

Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

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.