The weight of unknowing that comes before destroying a life, a feeling like passing a new room’s threshold, head dizzy, eyes adjusting.

You have never thought of yourself as someone who is embarrassed by her body—you’re a college athlete!—but you will be, intensely so.

Normally my being black makes my being American complicated, but in Paris I found myself perhaps saved by my nationality, by a particular foreignness, with my blackness possibly somewhat overlooked.

I’m standing in the grocery store balancing cloves of garlic in either hand. They are for my vagina.

“Creating some kind of art…is as close to leaving your brain behind in a jar as you’re going to get.”

Mom said, “I just feel like…I just want to turn right, and the whole world is turning left.”

I was a seemingly innocuous, privately neurotic, stone-broke girl seeking hiatus from the soul-sucking world of fine art, writing, coolly inebriated boys and waitressing.

She said this in the bed of a boy named Jeff, who wasn’t really a boy.

“I suppose I am really unaware of my writing process because I never really plan on writing anything, it just kind of happens.”

Rosemary’s Baby entered my life at the same time as my growing awareness of the power and mystery of place.