There's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.

A lot of my students have been quite notable. Notable in both the personal sense - people who have changed my life - and notable in that many have gone on to enormous success in their writing careers. Whether or not I had a lot to do with those success stories, I'm very proud and happy for my former students getting on the map.

For me, addiction never really included telling myself that everything was okay. By the time I was deep in my addictions, I knew things were pretty bad and I had no control over them.

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.

My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.