Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'
I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.
I feel I'm often misunderstood by critics. People project a lot or exaggerate the subjective fragility simply because it's frightening to them.
You can't tell an 18-year-old to keep it down and turn off Britney Spears or whatever it is that they listen to.
I had really wanted adventure. At the time that I ran away, lots of kids ran away from home. It was something of a social phenomenon.
It's true that your environment influences how you write.
I didn't like horses when I was a kid.
The first person to blow up my fashion consciousness was a 14-year-old girl named Sandrine. She was the most beautiful human I had ever seen.
Between my hatred of mall shopping and my mother's firm ideas about how a girl should dress, my style choices were pretty unenthusiastic: plaid skirts or whatever empire-waisted thingamabob was on sale at Sears.
The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.
Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.
One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings.
At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn't really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling.
I found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15.
Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.
For two people to satisfy everything each needs for their entire lives is a tall order. Some couples may be equipped to do this. Some are not.
Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker.
I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?'
My parents had met in high school and married right after my father came back from World War II. They honeymooned in Paris and returned to that city when my father, in college on the G.I. Bill, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.
On the rare occasions when my mother perfumed herself, she was going out, and so I rarely smelled those special scents up close on her body, except during kisses goodbye.
