If one writes the rules then one can contradict oneself. It's all about rhetoric, about official narratives.

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.

I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.

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

I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.