New York City is a place where you can lock yourself up in your little studio apartment, and not go outside at all, and not feel in the slightest guilty about it.
I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that’s without seams for me. It’s an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It’s an effort to be alive. It’s work. But writing is wonderful.
I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They’re desperate to know that you’re not lying to them or misleading them.
All children should be loved, protected, nurtured –emotionally and intellectually– respected, and never, under any circumstances, underestimated.
Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.
The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling.
He was raised without a proper diagnosis.
And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.
I was on the cover of a lot of newspapers. I was on the cover of USA Today for every single day for a month. I was on the masthead, so I tend to get recognized a lot, and in weird places. It’s always flattering, and it’s always odd. It’s always at the worst possible time.
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.
He’s a really nice guy, if only I weren’t me.
Instagram Share
