Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Although the point of blogging is that it doesn't pay, I often steal from my blog for paid publication. I've based several magazine essays on blog posts, as well as an entire book.

When you're sixteen and struggling to forge an identity out of a morass of hormones and daydreams, remarks like that cut a deep groove in the brain. I trace the ongoing, victorious-feeling semi-starvation of my twenties directly back to adolescence - as a way of showing those assholes that I could control my appetites... Which is so sad, in retrospect, because of course no one cared.

I was also writing in a tradition and trying to do something different with it, something that hadn't necessarily been done before, which was a risk, but it made it interesting. My relationship with food has been complicated and rocky and not always wonderful, and it's a lens through which my entire life and identity are refracted.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.