I am an accidental writer. Most days I'm still surprised the words made it out.

I grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, and I learned early that a journal could hold what the world couldn't. I wrote about beautiful things — the frozen earth cracking open each spring, the birth of a pony, blackberries that stained my lips all August. And I wrote about the unspeakable things, too. I was sexually abused from the time I was five until I ran away at fourteen. The journal was the only place I was safe to tell the truth.

Running away turned out to be its own education. I had nothing, and I could become anyone — and I did. The lust for survival sharpened into a lust for adventure, and eventually I landed in Los Angeles, right at the peak of its particular madness. The decadence, the drugs, the recklessness. By the ’90s, I found my way inside a world where I thought I belonged— Geffen Records, Gramercy Pictures, Fox Searchlight, Universal — working alongside people who were brilliant and broken in equal measure. But I watched what power did to people. I watched what wanting power did.

By then, running away had become an instinct for survival.

My memoir, Blind Pony, was the book I wrote because I had no choice. My novel, Desperation Will Kill You, is the book I wrote because I finally understood what all those years were for.