All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.

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.

Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people's asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn't have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it.

Our lives are a long series of acquiring and then sloughing narratives.

When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

I've always looked very closely at people, and seen a lot; that was true even when I was a kid. That's what made me a good domme, but it's also what makes me well suited to being a writer, and a teacher.

Maybe feeling of presence in my body is why I've always sought out extreme experiences; it forces me to be in a moment, to face the fact of my existing in that particular moment, in my body.