If a character is honest with a reader, then (hopefully) that will engage the reader's empathy centers; she'll meet that openness with acceptance, and they'll forge a nourishing and meaningful bond as the book continues.

They say you have to get and stay sober for yourself, and of course I agree with that, but I've really appreciated the added stakes of having someone relying on me for survival. My daughter makes me want to do right. That doesn't mean I won't relapse again. It's happened to me before. But she adds a layer of love in my life that I've never known.

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.

Self-respect doesn't come naturally to me. I need to constantly remind myself and do the work to err on the side of self-respect, rather than self-punishment.

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.

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

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.