A lot of the experiences I write about could be described as grasping for boundaries, trying to find the limits of things.

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.

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.

Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.

I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I've been a writer since I was five. You don't have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it's kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.

Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

Children's stories force logic upon the gruesome facts of our lives. They mirror our troubles and submit them to a chain of causality.