Writing About Women's Sexuality Is Very Scary

What If You Believed That Everything In Life Was Like A Prize? What If You Thought Of The World As A Big Random Drawing, And You Were Always Winning Things, The World Offering Them Up With A Big Grin, Like An Emcee's: Here You Go, Hollis. Here Is A Motorcycle. Here Is A Little Boy Who Loves You. Here Is A Weird Experience, Here Is Something Bad That You Should Mull Over Because It Will Make You A Better Person. What If You Could Think That Life Was This Free Vacation You'd Won, And You Won Just Because You Happened To Be Alive?

Maybe Love, Like Suffering, Is Relative.

I'm Certainly Very Influenced By What You Would Call 'contemporary Headline Horror,' Stuff That Is True Crime Or For One Reason Or Another Catches Our Attention In The Media, Those Strange Cases That We End Up Obsessing About. I'm Always Influenced By Weird Anecdotes And News.

I Read A Lot, But At The Same Time I'm Not A Particularly Good Or Diligent Or Discriminating Reader. I Go Through Maybe Close To A Thousand Or More Books A Year, But A Lot Of Times I'll Only Read Bits And Pieces Of Any One Individual Text.

For The Last Few Years I've Tried To Force Myself To Write At Least One Page Every Day, Which Doesn't Sound Like Much But It's Actually Pretty Hard To Manage. Because I'm Not Allowed To Do A Make-up Day. I Can't Do Two Pages The Next Day. The Punishment For Not Completing My Page Is That I Have To Eat A Vegetarian Meal The Next Day.