To this day, on my cheat days from my diet, which are New Year's Eve and my birthday, I buy luxury foods that are very indicative of my class.

My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.

I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.

I think there's a rule that once you want to live somewhere, you can't find a job.

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.

Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see.

I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic.