I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.

It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

I think the addiction stuff, because I was already sort of outed in my family as a sexual person: as a sexually-adventurous and sexually-conflicted person and sexually-driven person. They already knew that about me. They knew that about me when I was eleven. My parents very consciously tried to provide an environment that would protect me from becoming a drug addict.

My father was raised by a violent alcoholic. There was alcoholism in my mother's family. I'm half-adopted, and my birth father was a drug addict and alcoholic. So, I think they very consciously made decisions and parented me in a way that was aimed to help save me from that. So, I knew it would be particularly painful and it was, especially for my father.

I saved letters from my boss. There are things in there that are directly transcribed. I was so glad I did that. Sometimes when I was writing the book I wondered if some little writer hobbit part of my brain was back there puppeteering that action. But it really never, on any conscious level, occurred to me that I would write about it. I will say, I thought probably some day there would be an ancillary character in some novel - not in the one I was currently writing - that would be a dominatrix or something.

I have replaced my instinct for secrecy with an instinct for confession.

I absolutely think that women told that writing about themselves is somehow not worthy enough for a public audience all the time. I hear it so often from my students and friends. As if it doesn't take rigorous craft, and intellectual acuity to write a slammin' book of any kind. But perhaps, especially, about the body.