Catapult

I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living,

I have found that a fulfilling writing life is one in which the creative process merges with the other necessary processes of good living, which only the individual can define.

many times have I been privy to conversations among other writers in which we sneer at the very concept? We compulsively assure each other that writing isn’t about enacting a kind of therapy. How gross! We

The twenty-page essay I drafted about my years as a professional dominatrix was the most urgent thing I had ever written. When he read it, my professor insisted that I drop whatever I was working on and write a memoir.

To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.

White masculinity is for everyone, while media that features anyone of any other kind of identity cannot be expected to have an audience beyond those

who share that identity

The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.

You write it, and I will read it

The cause of this limiting of our range, of our scope,
is inertial: it is the narrative we have been told about ourselves or our stories, and so that’s the narrative we tend to tell. I’ve spent my whole life being prescribed narratives about my own body: how it should and shouldn’t look, what it should or shouldn’t do, and what its value is. Particularly, I have learned a lot from my culture, media, government, men on the streets of whatever city I’ve lived in, men whom I have loved and not loved, women whom I have loved and not loved, and even readers and fellow writers—and what I have learned is how my body is mostly good for sex and that sex should mostly be good for men.

the rush that makes you want to burst into a run—the things I was looking for in young love.