When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.

When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.

I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes "good" from "bad" luck.

Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.