To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only "real" in the space of the text.

Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it.

The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body - or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the reader to feel their own body while they are reading, is this: we live by and through the body, and the body, is a walking contradiction.

The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned - because they had to be - and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.

I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.

I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

When a female character sets herself on fire in an effort to interrupt her culture's violent abuse of disenfranchised people, or physically tortures and punishes her guardian rapist, or picks up a gun and fights back in ways that make her not pretty, or aggressively rejects her role as the object of desire, or even when she waddles off into the woods to squat and have a baby without the safety and expertise of hospitals and doctors, these are the kinds of violences and stories we can learn from.