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.

The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

I do have one regret though. I wish Kathy Acker was still alive. I wish I could go swim with her again. My literary indebtedness to her is enormous. She's a more important mother to me than anyone can possibly imagine. In language I became a daughter worth a crap because of her. In language I redefined daughter, woman, I became a writer. Dora is an homage of sorts.

When someone says something dunderheaded to me about the material, it's usually a big neon sign revealing their own damage or ignorance, so my compassion kicks in.

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests.

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.