You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.

I feel like the word shatter.

And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.

We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

I didn't go to school for a full year until I was 12. In the summer I was a wild child in the woods, with no shoes, and in the fall it was back to the city, shoe shops and school.