While your work isn't autobiographical, it's based on themes from your own life — what is that creative process like?

"I started writing in the spring of '94 — I fell into a very bad period of depression, and as I started getting better, I started typing. I started typing letters to this friend of mine, and I never thought, Oh, I'm going to turn this into a book — [the letters] became a receptacle for sadness. In my first book, I was writing to the fear of, What if I don't get the help I need in terms of medication? In I Smile Back, I was writing to the fear of, What else do we inherit, besides hair color and eye color, from our parents? My father's very similar to Laney's character; he didn't take drugs, but he was a very destructive force. I've tried so hard to get better and have this little family, but what if it's just latently in me and I'm just bound to destroy, no matter how hard I try not to?

"People seem to always think that I'm the Laney character, which is very funny because I live such a quiet, little, unexciting life. But all the feelings and the self-loathing, feeling undeserving, all of that, those are all personal; I relate to her in all those ways. And the overwhelming fear of when you love something so much, when you have these children and you love them so much, and you're so scared you're going to hurt them somehow, even when you're trying not to. I think every mother is always worried. How am I going to damage my kid?... My son and daughter, both of them came out perfect, and my thought was, I can only fuck them up from this moment. I can only ruin them; I can't possibly make them better."