The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

I think the key to writing the truth of our existences, so much of this is being incubated online, is examining the conflicts and the messiness, our sometimes dividedness, dealing with gender and other hierarchies, and also our identities outside of them, deeply personal and yet somehow critical and circumspect.

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!

All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work.

If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.