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I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

People say it's cathartic to write a book, but it turned out to be quite painful!

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.