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

My writing has always been considered extremely important, even though I make slim-to-no money at it.

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.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

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

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.

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness.