People are depressed for many reasons, one of which I think is how we have been taught to react to trauma, to stress.

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.

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.

For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage.

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.

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

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.