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.

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.

My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.

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

Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.

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.