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

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.

You don't have to write like David Foster Wallace or James Baldwin or Maggie Nelson - indeed, you shouldn't. Those writers are doing it better than you ever could.

I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true. It didn't sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That's sort of the reason I write everything.

I think trauma gets a reductive treatment. We tend to think only violence or molestation or total abandonment qualify as "childhood trauma," but there are so many ruptures and disturbances in childhood that imprint themselves on us. Attachment begets trauma, in that broader sense, and so if we've ever been dependent on anyone, I think there is an Imago blueprint in us somewhere.

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.

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