I can only see right in front of me when I'm writing, you know? I never think of it as raw or personal or anything but where I'm at in the moment. But I can see it sort of after I finish.

Torch songs are confessions. They are an expression of feeling that cannot be concealed or contained or minimized. They are marked by anguish, yes, but also by yielding.

I am secretive. Always have been. And one way that secrecy manifested in my early life was that I was adept at juggling multiple social realities: I could get by no problem in many social arenas (including that of high school), but also felt alienated and totally uninspired by everything that happened there.

Letting go of the cozy stories you've been carrying around is devastating. But there's more room for new stuff after you do it.

The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.

S&M is just a set of practices that get classified as a single category, when more accurately they are a part of much larger set of behaviors: expressions of love, and self, and play, and even art. There is no hard line between "vanilla" sex and S&M sex, or any other kind of relation between people.

The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.