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.

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 think trauma gets a reductive treatment. We tend to think only violence or molestation or total abandonment qualify as "childhood trauma," but there are so many ruptures and disturbances in childhood that imprint themselves on us. Attachment begets trauma, in that broader sense, and so if we've ever been dependent on anyone, I think there is an Imago blueprint in us somewhere.

All our stories are part invention - the way we've decided to make sense of what has happened.

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.

I see consensual S&M no differently than I see consensual anything: as beautiful, and never any one thing.

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.