Reader (talking about Mut@tus): The best stories always come from the heart and have a way of connecting with people who read them and think, “I’ve been there. I know what that feels like.”

Me: That’s precisely why I started writing this type of fiction. Somehow the topic of conversation always returned to our bodies, our bodies as battlefields, as a medium for negotiating and occupying social space. So often we reached a point in the conversation where we concluded: ‘we could never say that in public!’ And I thought: why not? We’d laugh, cry (if we had to), then get back to our day-to-day, slipping into a persona that didn’t quite fit, one which made us break out into a rash in places others couldn’t see. When I write, I scratch my itches in public. Without shame. Without a grudge. Without airs and graces. Only a deluded writer fails to recognize that experiences unique to her can be of little interest or benefit to anyone else. Style is another matter.