You started writing Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir prior to the James Frey thing happening. How far along were you when his duplicity was discovered, and did that cause you to reevaluate anything you were doing?
Girlbomb was finished, edited, printed, and only eight weeks away from release when James Frey was exposed by The Smoking Gun as having made up a whole bunch of shit in his two "memoirs." I read the story as it broke that Sunday night in January of 2006, and the first thing I did was crap my pants (metaphorically), because I knew this was one of the worst possible things that could happen right before my book release—now all memoirists were going to be seen as liars, and I'd be releasing the book into a hostile climate.
The second thing I did was to write to my editor and the lawyer who'd vetted my book during the editing phase, to say, "Hey, let me come in with all my archives—my notes and datebooks and report cards and et cetera from high school—and reassure you guys that I'm for reals." They graciously allowed this, so I lugged a giant box of yellowing old paper up to the lawyer's office and went through it with them, item by item—"See? I really was a slutty little drug addict! I really did steal money from my afterschool job! I promise!" It was a bizarre experience, trying to convince people that I was an unsavory miscreant in my youth, rather than the opposite. I remember talking to a guy from The New York Times that week, and offering to show him how to fold a snow-seal to carry your cocaine in, just to prove my street cred.

Why did you decide to do Girlbomb, and then your new book Have You Found Her, as memoir, as opposed to a fictionalized account of these two highly personal events? Had you considered writing Girlbomb as a novel at any point?
It never occurred to me to present either of these books as anything other than the truth. I felt like the fact that they were true stories made them way more interesting than fictionalized versions could have been. Also, I don't think you gain anything by writing your life story and then tweaking it and calling it "fiction." You don't spare yourself or anyone else in your life any of the embarrassment or pain, since readers automatically assume that any main character is based on the author, and your mom is going to recognize herself no matter what fictional hair color you gave her. I've read some works of fiction that were thinly veiled memoirs, and been like, "Why?" Just fucking own your shit, you know?
Of course, I know that I'm a horrible solipsist, as all memoirists are, and I'm not trying to take anything away from fiction as a genre—I love it. I just love it more when it's not so obviously based on the writers' life, but with better skin and a happier ending.

Memoir writing, especially when it's not explicitly humorous, seems like a pretty ballsy act. Were you afraid of the reactions from certain people in the books when they came out, and how founded or unfounded were your fears?
Ugh. You know, if anyone reading this is working on a memoir, I suggest that you do your best to forget that anyone else is ever going to read it. Because I was totally afraid of people's reactions, and in many cases my fears were completely founded. Some people were pretty sanguine about what I wrote about them, but others were pissed. It is pretty ballsy to write shit about other people, but I don't know if it's good-ballsy or bad-ballsy, you know? It sucks, that you sometimes have to invade people's privacy in order to tell your own story, but as long as you stick to the truth, and make yourself look as bad as you make others look, you should be able to sleep at night knowing that you were honest and fair.

Both your books offer quite a bit of introspection about the events you've written about. Were any of those insights a surprise to you?
Well, I've spent the past 12.5 years in therapy, so I'd already done a lot of the hard work of figuring out why the hell I was such a fuck-up for so long. But yeah, I had insights that surprised me while writing, though most of them were insights about other people. When writing Girlbomb, I realized that I was the same age my mom was when the events of the book started, and that threw me for a loop—how would I have acted, I had to ask myself, if I were in her shoes, with an emotionally damaged young daughter and no support system? That was a revelation to me. I also realized some things about my girlfriends, like my "evil" ex-best-friend Alice, whose mother was completely absent for most of our adolescence. At the time, it was like, "Cool, Alice has it so good, her mom's never home." Then while writing the book, I realized, "God, that must have sucked for Alice, to have had no parenting or stability whatsoever." But I was already all too aware of all my own damage when I started writing both books. It was other people's damage that surprised me.

Is memoir writing emotionally draining, cathartic, or both?
Memoir writing sucks. It's so fucking painful and exhausting. Reliving the worst parts of your life, the mistakes you've regretted for years, the humiliations, the bad hairstyles, the whole thing sucks. I thought I had leukemia when I was writing Girlbomb, because I had to keep lying down on the floor of my office and taking naps; I smoked a bushel of marijuana while writing both books. But then when it's done, it's the most cathartic thing in the world. It has left your body, and it's outside of you now. I was carrying around so much shit that I just don't have to hang on to anymore, because it's right there in a book, in case I ever need it.

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