“For a long time, I felt like I was destined to inherit a certain kind of life and so I wouldn’t let myself think of it for fear of being even cognitively associated with it. But writing about those same people and places changed that, and I could suddenly face them and understand them and forgive them. It was really then that I was able to understand that I wasn’t my past. Nobody is. One thing I have always loved about writing is how it can transform you and allow you to reinvent yourself. You could spend your whole life as a teacher, a doctor, a mother, a convict, whatever it may be; but the day you start writing, you start over. You’re a writer now.”