I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk.

The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling.

Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world.

I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play.

I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human.