I made a conscious decision when I was writing that book to depict in real time how I treated it, and how I thought about it, and how I portrayed it to other people, because I wanted the story to be one of change from that to a more honest appraisal, a more accepting appraisal of myself and other people in that world.

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.

Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.

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 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.

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

I saved letters from my boss. There are things in there that are directly transcribed. I was so glad I did that. Sometimes when I was writing the book I wondered if some little writer hobbit part of my brain was back there puppeteering that action. But it really never, on any conscious level, occurred to me that I would write about it. I will say, I thought probably some day there would be an ancillary character in some novel - not in the one I was currently writing - that would be a dominatrix or something.