When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition.
The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.
For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail.
I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.
I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.
I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.
I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.
Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.
Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.
I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.
The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.
I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it.
