The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

As a young writer, I learned a lot about grammatical structure from reading plays, from performing the plays. I think that was a wonderful apprenticeship.

Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.