I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

You need to be distracted.

I don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

Saul Bellow has that character in Henderson the Rain King say: "I want, I want, I want!"9 I remember reading this passage years ago and thinking, yes, that's the human.