You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.

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

You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.

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 could not kick heroin to save my life, literally, until I started telling my secrets. It was some of the clearest evidence I've ever found of anything. It was the only immediate change in behavior I've ever undergone. I told the most frightening truths, and I was free.

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

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.