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

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.

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those minute-and-a-half happinesses.

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 was an only child. And it's very much my temperament. I remember playing with a piece of string in my room for hours. I had never thought about what it would be like to have siblings.

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.

If you need somebody to dig up rocks eight hours a day underwater, call me.