My mom was a social worker. I had a pretty good idea of what the authorities can do when a parent's not around.

The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

Even as my family fell apart and things were at their most hopeless, my dad and I found a lot of happiness in the wilderness - sleeping on the cold gravel and killing as many things as we could get our hands on. Even as my mom got progressively more crazy, we found a happiness, in flashes.

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.

I'm pretty much of the Shakespearean school. Dialogue is character. How we speak is who we are.

There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.