You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented.

Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.

The starkest rejection letter might be followed by a million-dollar advance. Don't let rejection start to look the same as failure.