With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

Recovery is an ongoing project that is really discrete from everything else in my life. It allows me to be an agent, allows me to write, allows me to be married, allows me to be part of a family. The writing is not a support beam of recovery but a happy consequence of it.

My experience of fiction was, in the beginning, so exploratory. I wasn't sitting down to a desk at Yaddo with a month, thinking I have to have a draft of a novel.

I spent the first 33 years of my life with secrets, and lots of them. I spent a great deal of energy worrying over what people thought and obscuring the things I was ashamed of... trying to appear what I thought was normal.

I don't think it is a novel. I still think it's a memoir.