Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant. You have to be, in order to survive all the animals and cliffs and crevasses and rapids - at some point, your brain has to kick [out of] that childish daydream world and start making I-want-to-live decisions.

Maybe it's easier to think about dishonesty and what kind of trouble you can get into as a writer when love and honesty collide and you sidestep that collision, either because you want to protect somebody or you want to blame somebody - which are the usual impulses in love: protection and blame, frequently at the same time - so you don't exactly tell the truth.

It feels like people talk a lot, in their relationships and in therapy. But my family wasn't like that. My dad wasn't and I wasn't. Things were said, but via the language of action.

I wasn't in a position that some other memoirists are, dealing with families who fed them meth, or kidnapped them, or did something that would make the writer not want to see that family again. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to celebrate them. I was proud of who we were, in the wilderness, floating down rapids or hiking over glaciers, and everywhere else.

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out and swim and make more paramecia. That seems like an obvious universal goal for most humans.

I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into a monster. Which she wasn't. She was a human: somebody who loved me and somebody with a problem.

I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people who grow really early and have to learn how to take care of themselves. They have trouble hinging their lives with anybody else.