Abandonment by a lover won't kill us. But it awakens the parts of us that remember when it could.

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.

I have always trusted writers, books, thinkers, psychologists in figuring things out. Maybe because they don't know me, so they are always honest, if that makes sense. Their wisdom and counsel are always unconditional.

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.

I can still discern people's weaknesses, but it doesn't make me want to exploit them; it makes me want to hug them.

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.

I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you're ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don't have to show it to anybody. That's what I did.