Yes. I think it was a response to my environment—to being misunderstood and feeling that the environment of my family was promulgating a version of life that I was at odds with and that I didn’t agree with. I think my earliest question was, Is my version the right one? Or am I wrong? Very early on I came to see writing as a place where truth could be gotten at, but also where the truth could be defended. The fact that it could be written down—said—where it could not be said, at least not by me, in the reality of my home, created a very powerful sense of duality in me.

I suppose if there is a reckoning in middle age, it’s a tragic sense that you have been formed by things, and sent hither and thither by those things, and put in a frenzy and made to run around the place, and up and down the house in the service of those things, and they were not real. They were the product of your upbringing or conditioning or gender or social class. And I think there’s a certain point where suddenly the grip of all of that on you loosens. It’s like a stage set beginning to sort of crumble, and you start to see it wobbling, and I think you can get some really startling and frightening perspectives on identity once you start looking at it from there. The thought that you’ve wasted your entire life in the service of things that didn’t really exist—that you were in a prison where the door, in fact, was open, and you’ve sat there all this time . . . A lot of what I was writing in these books was concerned with that.