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

I think genius can have a lot to do with nerve. And permission.

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

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

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.

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.