Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.

There IS more criticism of puritanism, and more distance from Christian morality, than there has been before.

In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read.

I'm like the kid in kindergarten; I really do send valentines to everyone.

Behind every erotic condemnation there's a burning hypocrite.

I had no idea that mothering my own child would be so healing to my own sadness from my childhood.