I always listen to music when I write! I basically make a playlist for every essay; sometimes it's just one song, or three songs, over and over and over. I sort of find the emotional pitch of the piece, and then match music to it, and then the music becomes a shortcut to the feeling, so I can enter it and work anywhere: on planes, cafes, at work, the train.

You don't know how people are going to respond. But I would add to that, that getting your heart broken is not the worst thing and it's actually quite unavoidable. I think in some ways I had to break my father's heart and then face that in order to have a real relationship with him.

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.

I always wished I could go to confession. I was so full of things I couldn't name and had an instinct to hide. I felt burdened by the loneliness of my interior life. I wanted some container that I could empty myself into, some ear that would never be shocked, even if it offered me some kind of penance.

Desperation precludes reflection. That is one of the reasons why smart people can get involved in very obviously unworkable relationships. Like addiction, that deep, Imago attachment is more powerful than logic, and in fact disables logic. So, any explanation or analysis or reflection on such a feeling is already many steps removed from the experience.

I couldn't have articulated this process at the time; I just sort of did it instinctually. But now when I talk about this with my students all the time, it's one of the first things I address in memoir classes - that you have to put it all in because you're writing your way into the ending of your own story. Even if you think you know what the story is, you don't until you write it. If you start leaving things out you could leave out vital organs and not know it.

Most of the smart things I've ever thought or written came vis-a-vis my body.