What little boys are made of

You've published one memoir and two anthologies. Do you prefer working in one genre over the other?

Doing an anthology is like conducting a symphony: You're orchestrating different ideas, different writers. It's fairly administrative. A memoir is more like taking off all your clothes and walking down a crowded city street -- all that vulnerability and adrenaline.

Is the vulnerability the good part or the bad part?

That's the bad part. The good part is that writing a memoir is making a map of your own evolution. It's a clearing, too. With "Black, White and Jewish," I let all this stuff go through the writing. It was amazingly cathartic.

For me there's always been a price to pay for the catharsis.

With a memoir it's inevitable that you're going to hurt some people. In the past I felt that telling my story was the most important thing. But I'm not convinced that the damage is worth it. Now I feel like telling my story and taking care of the people I love are equally important. There's got to be a way to write honestly and meaningfully about my life and not cause anyone suffering. I've been thinking of it as a challenge: What does it mean to tell my truth and live authentically and also take care of people? Is that possible?

Truth-telling versus caretaking: You're not the first artist to confront that dilemma.

It calls for a radical shift in my perspective.

From what to what?

From an idea of myself as a kind of lone artist who can just keep moving from project to project, relationship to relationship, place to place, the infinitely morph-able, infinitely changeable shifting renegade female warrior artist -- that's a trope I inherited, a real trope of the women's movement -- to someone who understands that the joy of life is not found only in self-expression but in intimacy with others.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...

Exactly. I've had a romantic idea of freedom, of following one's muse, that hasn't really taken other people's feelings into account. That's been a very difficult lesson for me to learn.

I know this is a touchy subject, but what can you say about the effects of your books on the important relationships in your life?

I can say that "To Be Real" and "Black, White and Jewish" put a lot of strain on my personal relationships. The first book was not well received by the women I grew up with. They felt like I was critiquing them, calling them narrow. That book challenged the very idea of the feminist identity they'd worked so hard to establish.

With "Black, White and Jewish" the problems were with my parents and other family members. The work I had to do to heal those relationships taught me a lot about what's really important -- as did going through a breakup with my partner of eight years. Both of us were very committed to our art. We both believed we could wantonly pursue our creative impulses without understanding how to survive that as individuals and as a family.

Art from suffering, suffering from art...

So many kids of my generation were raised with this permissive progressivism, without rules or stability. Our parents were busy doing the right thing, trying to challenge the orthodoxy of the time. We paid a pretty heavy price for that: a sense of security, a sense of limits. Many of us experimented with things we probably shouldn't have. I know I did.

How has your own upbringing affected the kind of mother you are?

When my son was younger I could be the chummy kind of mom. But in the last few years I've had to become much more stern, much more the real grown-up mom. It's challenging, but I'm enjoying it. I'm proud of my commitment to my son. It's a big deal to take on the responsibility of a child who's (a) not your biological child, then (b) to not flinch when the relationship with the child's biological parent ends.

What moves you from book to book?

It's always something in my psyche that needs to be resolved, a place where I feel a little blocked, where there's some kind of restriction I want to work through. The energy of writing the book helps to clear it. It's weird: My books are so thematic, but I'm not somebody who's interested in trends or the temperature of the moment in pop culture. I'm someone who cares about where we're going as a species in terms of human relating. I'm more emotional than I am pop psych. I'm all about, how does it feel?

Might there be a novel in your future?

I've been trying to write a novel since 2001. I had the idea that I did the memoir, I did the anthology, now I have to do a novel. Working on it was agony! I finally just decided to let it go. My mom's such a novelist, I wanted to connect in that way, to share that. But we don't. Which is fine.

So what's next?

Another memoir, believe it or not, based on the year I spent in Africa. I fell in love with this guy, ended up leaving abruptly, and almost died of dengue fever. It's about transcontinental romance, the indestructibility of love.

Who's going to get mad at you about this one?

That remains to be seen. [Chuckles, then grows somber.] I just want to do my work, have people read it, and have it mean something to them. I want to feel like I can transform the difficulties of my life into something that's helpful not just for me, but for other people. And I want to be able to do the hard work of changing myself when it's clear that I need to.

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