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

I think the female first-person is still dismissed, demonized, especially if the book does not end on an empowering note, especially if the main character is perceived as unlikeable, or too privileged.

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'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.

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.

It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.

How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.