Nora Ephron said, “Everything is copy.” But in a memoir, much like in reality TV, art cannot represent life exactly. People are characters, snapshots of their “real” selves.
With every step, I realized I didn’t have to be juggling All The Things to be a worthwhile member of society. I just needed to exist.
Even on my worst day as a writer, I’m closer to the creative life I dreamed of at eighteen than ever before.
The years I suppressed my queerness are a loss that I’m exploring and grieving—if only through fiction.
I previously had no concept of what it was like to be a victim of your troubled mind.
As a way to cope with rejection, I often repeated to myself: Focus on the work rather than the results.
I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings.
We have the right to imagine what is possible beyond the systems that try to destroy us. Black and queer writers have long imagined worlds beyond this one.
For all her various contrived public personas and her possibly manufactured cult following, Taylor Swift is a modern day poet.
“The book is not straightforward, but it is expansive, and I don’t think the only way to make a story cohere is chronology.”