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It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it's all part of making sense of who I am.

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

To me, writing is remembering something funny that happened, or maybe something I said seven years ago.

They say every writer really just writes about one thing over and over. I guess my one thing is how the past impacts the present.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

I've been working on my autobiography, just pecking away in longhand. The more you write, the more you remember. The more you remember, the more detail you recall. It's not all pleasant!