While the hero journeys for external fame, fortune, and power, the heroine tries to regain her lost creative spirit… Once she hears the cries of this lost part of herself needing rescue, her journey truly begins.

So now I know. I fear the unknown so deeply that I'd rather repeat the same heart-breaking pattern than face something or someone I can't predict.

Being a New Jersey native, going down to the shore for my whole life, it's a big thing that out of towners are very much looked down on and there is a real conflict between the locals and the Bennies - people that are out of towners, not from the shore. That's slang going back in the day.

During the process of writing the book, I had this experience that was telling for me. I got it and the basic idea and got the plots and everything, but I wasn't sure who the audience was. I exist in this other world - in the book publishing and magazine world of people who would make fun of this project. We were driving home after two weeks in Maine, and we stopped in a gas station in Massachusetts and saw that Snooki had just been arrested. It was a surreal moment. My last few weeks were spent trying to get in this person's head, and there she was in on the cover of the New York Post .

While the hero journeys for external fame, fortune, and power, the heroine tries to regain her lost creative spirit… Once she hears the cries of this lost part of herself needing rescue, her journey truly begins.