I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark.

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.

What would you write if you weren’t afraid?

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I’d sooner do without air than prayer.

Together we read Keats’s letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it’s like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.

Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met.

I don’t think I look like the pope’s favorite Catholic – at least not under close scrutiny.

Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy – whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don’t know.

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue – not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless.