I think the mad wives and mistresses are my hysterics - even the fictionalized ones. I want to trace how they were silenced, I want to find for them an escape route.

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

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

When I get too worked up about things I have always escaped into catatonia.

The concept of "girl-on-girl crime" is perplexing to me, and it happens in many ways. There are those, who refuse to identify with women as a group, preferring the shade of the mythologized men, who want to keep up the status quo.

I try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.

My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.