It's life. You don't figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

I come to writing from hearing great stories as a child in Louisiana, where the mark of a person was his or her ability to be a raconteur. I also come to writing as a professional actress whose body has been trained to listen and smell and inhabit characters without judgment.

It's life. You don't figure it out. You just climb up on the beast and ride.

You know how some people, when they're together, they somehow make you feel more hopeful? Make you feel like the world is not the insane place it really is?

I am the kind of woman who loves hurricanes. They put me in a party mood. Make me want to eat oysters on the half shell, and act slutty.

How wide and sweet and wild motherhood and sisterhood can be.

I think of myself as Rebecca Wells from Lodi Plantation, in Central Louisiana, a girl who was lucky enough to be born into a family that encouraged creativity and didn't call me lazy or nuts when I dressed up in my mother's peignoirs and played the piano, having painted a small sign decorated in glitter that read 'The Piano Fairy Girl.