It may be true too that I would not have encountered the most important books and art and ideas of my life had I not chased down a Ph.D. I've thought about that a lot....MAYBE I would have found the same books on my own, but I can't know for sure.

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.

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.

One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

I first read Freud's famous case study on hysteria based on his client Ida Bauer when I was in my twenties. It pissed me off so badly it haunted me for 25 years. But I had to wait to be a good enough writer to give Ida her voice back. And I had to go get my own first too. I not only know the case study inside and out, like most women, I lived a version of it. Maybe it's time for us to tell our versions.

I might think that equality has been achieved, there is no power relation going on in terms of class, race, or gender, I might just want to drink my latte and buy pretty shoes and write books about girls who marry, die, or go insane, then go get my nails done.

People - I mean couples - don't like to talk much about fighting. It's not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look... sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn't ugly. There is a way for anger to come our as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage.