Motorcycles aren't about gaining agency, I don't think.

You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not. But, from writing about art, I had met some artists in L.A. They said, "Why don't you try living out here?" So I traded apartments with the painter Delia Brown. That was in 2003. I loved it. I still love living there.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I guess I still feel that way and yet I'm slightly hesitant to insist on that idea, that it "better be fun for the writer." Or rather, that if it is, then the pleasure is a sign that it's good. Maybe I feel I've read that somewhere, other writers saying it, and I just think there is possibly no formula, and I don't like to read an interview with a writer where they just lay out the doxa of what quality is. It can seem brittle to do that.

There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.