When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.

Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

Sometimes I do feel exposed. I have this kind of theory about different channels or levels of relaying experience - when I tell someone, one on one, in a personal context, about something that's happened to me - that has a very different valence, a different charge, than when/if I've said it in a public forum.

It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.