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

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

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

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.

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.

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.