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.

The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.

Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.

Underneath the forms of fiction and poetry, you can bet your ass the ground comes from someone's actual life experience.

I get kind of tired of the "But it's your life!" attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around "memoir"? I'm curious how you feel about it just now.

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.

In my real life I had to confront the sins of the father, but it's also a symbolic journey - a social, psychological, sexual journey for women and minorities who must pass through patriarchy and the symbolic order in order to claim a self.