we shape and improve on, we don’t change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffe

My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That’s why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.

you knew it wasn’t working, why did you marry him? And all I can say is, I didn’t know how not to. I believed I was in too deep before the invitations were ever mailed, before the engagement. Maybe it was inexperience or maybe I was stupid. The relationship had a momentum that was taking us to this place, and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it

I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

Not only did I learn how to write a novel in Provincetown, I found the perfect person to read it. Elizabeth McCracken was another of the writing fellows at the Work Center that season, and she lived three houses away from me. If I looked out my kitchen window I could see if her light was on. Sometimes you don’t realize what’s lacking in life until

(Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.)

I was greatly affected by Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift,

One misconception about workshops is that you learn the most about how to be a better writer on the day your story is discussed—not true. People are nervous, sometimes deathly so, when their story is being dissected, and there’s always a great deal of ego involved. But it’s when someone else has their turn at bat that you actually get to see what’s

Being the one to stand in front of the class and talk about a book for fifty minutes made me read at a whole new level. I was forced to think through every idea I had about a story, to support all of those ideas with examples from the text, and articulate my thoughts in a cogent manner. In short, I started to study how writers did what they did wit