Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

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.

Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.

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 think that more so, my wonderful skill of dissociation came in very handy. I care very much what other people think. I'm a total pleaser. I want everyone to like me all the time. I feel like people who don't feel that way on some level are lying, but particularly female memoirists. We want to be seen and we want to be forgiven. So that occurred to me very early on.

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.

Behaviors and lifestyles that are classified as "normal" rarely get so generalized, public perception of heterosexual relationships, for instance, or of the "white" experience, allow for the infinite variety of experiences that exist under such headings, but people love to reduce the vastness of individuality and subjectivity within marginalized types of experience.