How Should a Person Be? also considers HOW and WHO we should be as teenagers. Do you think that’s something we have to figure out for ourselves? Alone? Is there anything girls should know when they’re figuring this stuff out?

If I look back to myself as a teenager, I found role models in literature. The way I was reading and the way that I was relating to the writers I was reading was very intense—not just about their work, but also about their lives, their personas. I read all sorts of interviews with writers in The Paris Review when I was a teenager. That was a huge education for me. So I feel like there’s a way of learning how to be a person through not exactly imitation, but admiration and close attention to people that excite you, or whose work you like, or who have done things in the world that you admire. When you move out of the house—I moved out when I was 17—you sort of take on substitute parents that are like your chosen parents. For me, that was Jean Cocteau and Henry Miller and Simone de Beauvoir. The way that they lived, for better or worse, became a model for the rest of my life. It was a way of affirming to myself that a life that revolved around art was possible and legitimate and beautiful and valuable.

If I’m supposed to turn that into advice, I would say pay close attention to the people in the world who are living lives that you could see yourself happily living. And if they’re alive, seek them out and talk to them, meet them and make them your friends, or have a single conversation with them. You know, if I read something by a writer and I really love it, I’ll write them a letter and I’ll just say, “I really admired what you did.” Reaching out to artists and writers that you respect is a really simple thing you can do, and a very useful thing. I don’t think people are ever like, “Ugh, another email telling me that my book moved someone.” No one ever feels exhausted by that. Everyone takes a lot of pleasure in that.

And if they’re not alive, read their work, read their biographies, read interviews with them. I think that’s a route to figuring out how you want to live. I don’t think any human makes up a life completely from a blank page. Lives are always modeled on other lives.

You have to kind of borrow a little bit.

Yeah. Unfortunately, the people I picked didn’t live very happy lives. I think that was something that I didn’t actually care about when I was a teenager, and don’t actually still care about today. But we all have our own criteria for what makes life valuable.

I can see how reading about the lives of different artists can create a path, in a way, for you to make that kind of life happen for yourself, but doesn’t it also kind of romanticize that sort of life? Is that something you had to figure out while you were becoming a writer: What’s the real work of this, and what have I romanticized? Or, how can I do what I love and still pay the rent?

Well, I did romanticize suffering, I’m sure, much more when I was a teenager than I do now. Also, when you look at someone’s productions years after their death, all you’re left with is their greatest work. You’re not left with the stupid thing they wrote for some magazine or whatever they did for money. So I think I was wrong in imagining that there was no compromise at all, that they were never doing a job just because they needed $200 even if it’s a job you don’t care about.

And I guess the other thing [I learned] is that being an artist is really just about making art. It’s really just about doing the work. It’s not a lifestyle. It’s not an attitude. It’s not a look. It really is just about working. You know, I’m not trying to live “the life of a writer.” I just want to write, and I do everything I can to have as much time as possible to write.

It’s funny that you said people should reach out to artists and writers they admire—I actually emailed you two years ago being like, “Oh my god, How Should a Person Be? really made me think about what I want to be like as a writer…but I’m SCARED.”

[Laughs] Did I reply to your email?

You did! You wrote me a really nice reply. You said, “Why should you be afraid of writing anything? Writing is supposed to be a release!” I actually think that helped me a lot. I mean, it’s still scary, but I’m getting there.

[Laughs] I think I remember that correspondence, now that you mention it! But even if the person doesn’t reply, that’s no reason to feel discouraged or bad. I mean, I’ve written letters to people who haven’t replied. But the truth is, they probably really appreciate it and are just too busy to write back. You can just think, They gave me a gift of their art and I gave them a gift of my letter.

I saw on Twitter that you’re working on a new project using things you’ve put in your diary. Have you always kept a diary, or is that a recent thing?

I’ve always kept a diary, but I don’t really think of it as a diary, because I don’t write in it regularly. I just write in it whenever I most need to. I tend to write in it when I’m having extreme confusion or extreme emotion and it doesn’t feel like it can go into art productively and it doesn’t feel like it can go into conversations with friends productively. So I just write in there. It’s just a place to put my feelings and anxieties. It’s also a way of not burdening the people around me with my own angst—though I do that too, definitely. [Laughs]

I was curious to see how much I repeated myself in the diary over the last 10 years. It’s been a decade of tremendous change. I wondered, you know, did I write a sentence like “I wish I lived in New York” 40 times over the last 10 years? Or, like, “I love him.” How many times did I write that? And about how many different men?

So I took all my diaries, which was about 400,000 words or something in the end, and I put every sentence on its own line, then I dumped that into Excel. There’s a feature in Excel that says A-Z. And in one minute [all the single sentences] were alphabetized. There’s implied story in each sentence—not a narrative, but…the sentences are so full, you know? I think the projects that you can’t let go of have a real mystery at their core that you can’t quite solve, so you keep coming back to it. I feel like that about the diaries—there’s just some mystery at the core of it that keeps me coming back.

Do you usually work on more than one project at a time?

I usually have one big book that I’m working on at a time. But I certainly don’t work on that particular book every day. My moods are so different from day to day, and what I feel I’m capable of feels different every day. I guess I just go with what I need to do without judging it. So I usually work on five or six different things at once—maybe it’s an article that I’m writing and an interview that I’m doing with somebody, and then I’m working on something else that may become a book or may not. I like moving between things. I just like working all the time, really.

If you’re working as a writer, working is a kind of play. I feel like, if all day long you’re just applying yourself to what you’re most genuinely curious about or most excited about—if you do that all the time, work will emerge. ♦