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.

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

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

She smoked because she craved something to do with her hands, that delicate interplay of light and cup and first inhale. Craved the repetition of it. It was so difficult sometimes to be still in a room, alone with oneself. To bare oneself to the lonely.

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

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.

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries."