Sometimes I feel as if four thousand years of silencing women, of the fear of women who were burned in oil or eviscerated in front of their daughters, is imprinted deep within me and has altered my DNA.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Like lots of women who marry young and find themselves mothers by the time they're 25, I felt I no longer had an identity.
When I realised that I had feelings for men as well as women, at first I was worried and frightened, and there was a certain amount of 'Who am I? Am I a criminal?' and so on. It took me a long time to come to terms with myself. Those were painful years - painful then and painful to look back on.
We have built our identities in many respects based on the guilt-ridden stories we have been told about our creation. For women, it is a very damning knowledge to be portrayed as curious and careless seductresses.
I think I got a lot of my 'funny' DNA from my mother, who had a glorious sense of the ridiculous.
There's a real sense of fighting and destruction in our DNA that we don't get in touch with.
No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.
I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.
I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.
I was raised by strong women, and that DNA is in my daughter and wife.
I'm not a plastic surgeon, and I cannot change the DNA of a person, but when I see a woman try on my clothes and she feels beautiful, I know I am doing my job.