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

The other reason I didn't want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone.

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

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.

The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.

The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.

New York at night, from its bridges, is a miracle. When I first came to the city, it took all my fantasies and set them on fire, turned them into flickering constellations of light.