One of my moments of coming to writing, of needing to write to attempt to create myself, to attempt to absolve and understand my past passivity, came when a girl I loved very much, who I had been estranged from for some time, killed herself.

I think the online space can be a free space, in that we are not reliant online on the publishing industry or readers who just don't get it.

I always remember my childhood as traumatic, for various reasons; I always felt alienated, outside.

I think for a woman, getting older can help, through personal experience, although of course older women are then rendered invisible in our society, another existential crisis.

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

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.

For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.