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.

You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.

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.

It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.

One of the things I love most about second person is that it reminds the reader that they are reading a text. It doesn't allow them to drift into the story and not notice that they are reading a book - a book that has an author.

Some of the biggest challenges were, page after page, standing naked in front of the reader.

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.