Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family.
I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I'd worked, the history of my books - just in case I up and die.
I began to write, believing that all I had to do to change things would be to write the other side, to tell the stories that I heard from my grandmother.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
I write about my feelings, things that happen in my life and experiences.
There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.
I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.
I was the typical little sister who wanted to be just like her older brother. When I was growing up, my brother wrote phenomenal stories, so I wanted to write them, too.
The hardest thing to write was explaining what anxiety feels like. Every time I'd try to really write about what it feels like to have an anxiety attack, I would actually have an anxiety attack. It was good material but so incredibly uncomfortable.
My wife Cecily Adams was dying of cancer, my daughter Madeline was struggling to overcome an autism diagnosis, and my father was dying, all at the same time. Writing the journal was a cathartic experience, and an extremely positive one.