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.

I don't think men experience the embargo on channeling the autobiography in their literature.

It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.

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.

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

On the whole, most biographies about literary women tend to diagnose them.

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.