Memoir-writing, especially about tragic events that turn out positively, can affect readers in highly emotional ways—I remember how people really fell in love with James Frey, and how everybody was amazed by the events in The Glass Castle. What sort of feedback have you gotten from the public about Gilrbomb and Have You Found Her?
I got great feedback about Girlbomb, and so far the response to Have You Found Her has been really good, too. Ninety-five percent of that feedback comes from women who have found themselves in similar circumstances to mine, whether they were wild girls in high school, or wide-eyed volunteers in their thirties. I hear from a lot of ex-homeless women, or women who have had insane co-dependent relationships with girls they mentored. I bet Jeannette Walls gets a shitload of email from formerly poor people. I'm grateful for every e-mail or blog comment I receive. Nobody has expressed any skepticism over any of the events portrayed in either book, as extreme as some of those events were, because, unfortunately, so many other people have lived through similar things.

I think the public accepts and loves memoirs, but some book critics seem a little snippy about them. Any thoughts on that? Is it just an old-guard reaction to a zeitgeist change?
Memoirists are the reality show contestants of the literary world. We're shameless, navel-gazing attention whores, and we're degrading the culture with our whining and self-pity. Readers don't mind because they're just looking for a good story that will help shed some light on their own lives, but critics are really annoyed by us, probably because there are so damn many of us, and we're all competing to see who had it worst.

I think after the Frey fiasco, some readers and critics began to conflate memoirs with journalistic writing, which it clearly is not. What's your opinion regarding the subjective truths offered in memoirs?
My opinion is this: Don't lie. Tell the truth as you remember it. Be as honest as you can be. But don't worry about being journalistically correct about everything. A memoir is more about feelings than about facts; it's an emotional journey, not a logistical one. If you want to write a history of your family, then do the research and write one. But if you just want to write your own story, fuck the research, and write what you remember. That's what's important to readers.

After reading Girlbomb, Have You Found Her seemed almost like a sequel. Much of Girlbomb centers on your difficult relationship with your mother, and in Have You Found Her it seems like you were trying to mend that by mentoring a homeless girl who reminded you of yourself as a teenager.
Totally. I definitely think of the second book as a sequel to the first—it's the exact same setting and main character, with most of the same problems, just 19 years later. I was indeed trying to mother someone to make up for my own lack of mothering, and I got so involved in repairing my own shit that I didn't see the young person who was right in front of me…until it was too late.

You were finishing up Girlbomb while the events of Have You Found Her were transpiring. Did your relationship with Samantha help to illuminate anything that you had been going through when you were a homeless teenager? How much of that affected Girlbomb—were you able to incorporate that any of that into the book?
I'd actually just finished Girlbomb when I met Sam—I think I handed in the book the week before we met. I remember meeting with my original editor in January of 2005 to discuss the minor edits she wanted to make, and being completely distracted during the meeting because I was worried about my new friend Sam, who'd just been remanded to a psych ward. So Samantha didn't shed any light on things when I was writing the book, but the girls I met at the shelter before her did. I paid close attention to their emotional states, their ways of interacting with each other, and especially their dialogue. Some of the dialogue in Girlbomb was directly lifted from conversations I heard between them.

It's kind of hard to talk about Have You Found Her without giving away too much, which I don't want to do since it has such an emotional impact. Did you find it difficult yourself to maintain the distance needed while writing so that you didn't telegraph what happens?
Yeah, there's kind of a surprise ending to the book, which I didn't see coming when I was living it. And then the book was due so soon after the events had unfolded—I didn't have a lot of time to live with the strong feelings they inspired before I started writing about them. Which is one reason that I tore through the first draft—475 pages in three months. I was dying to get it over with so I could stop fucking dwelling in the most painful place imaginable. And I was a wreck while writing it. I write in a shared workspace and often had to stop and get up from my desk and go into the bathroom so that other people didn't see me cry or turn purple with rage. At one point, I really thought I was going to have an aneurism. So I really had no emotional distance at all for the first draft, which is why it took eight more months and two more drafts to get it to a place where it was publishable.

Sam was lucky to have found three smart, resourceful women who were willing to help her find housing and get into rehab. Was her experience unusual, or do many of shelter teens form these sorts of relationships?
I think Sam was unusually charismatic and bright, and she'd learned to draw people in to her story, so she was able to get a lot more help and a greater share of the available resources than other residents did. But I know other volunteers and social workers who have made very strong personal commitments to particular kids, so I know that it happens—just not for everyone, which is a shame. Every young person in crisis needs as many advocates and allies as they can get, not just the smart, funny ones.

When did you decide to write about what happened between you and Sam? And how much changed about your approach during the course of writing the book?
After Girlbomb, I was working on a novel, which my original editor had approved, but then she abruptly changed her mind and told me to start over with a new idea, not that I had one. Fortunately, by then, it was becoming obvious that the most salient thing in my life was my volunteering, and specifically my relationship with Sam, so I knew the next book would be about that. There are some posts on my blog from Summer 2005 where I'm trying to figure out how to write about Sam and the other girls from the shelter without exploiting them or invading their privacy. Sam had given me explicit permission to write about her (using the name "Sam," and not her real name), but I was still grappling with the exploitation/privacy issue when the plot twist hit us. Then I realized, "Well, fuck everything else, I've got to write about this now."
But as much as the plot changed over the course of the planning of this book, my approach to the writing of it was consistent—I went back and looked at my journals, emails, and blog posts, and tried to write as honestly and accurately as I could about the events, sparing myself nothing along the way. That's my "process," and it didn't change.

What about your next book? Do you think you'll stick with memoir? I personally might like to read a book about your slam poetry days when you toured with Lollapalooza.
Right now, I'm working on more memoirs, though I may decide to turn it into fiction, despite everything I said above about owning your shit. I owned my shit for two books; I might try to give myself a break for the third one. But there isn't that much more of my past left to mine for material, and I'm hoping that nothing insane enough to be worth writing about ever happens to me again.

(April, 2008)