Leigh Newman

Resisting and avoiding pain sucks energy-and time. The more you let yourself feel those minute-and-a-half hells, the quicker you'll start feeling those…

— Leigh Newman

“Pain only seems scary while you're waiting for it to happen. After it does, it's just hurt and recovery.”

— Leigh Newman

I turned what was a wonderful case of self-reliance into a case of self-exile. Which is not uncommon, I think, in people…

— Leigh Newman

I wasn't in a position that some other memoirists are, dealing with families who fed them meth, or kidnapped them, or did…

— Leigh Newman

It feels like people talk a lot, in their relationships and in therapy. But my family wasn't like that. My dad wasn't…

— Leigh Newman

The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy -…

— Leigh Newman

Often, I think that my brothers were the reason I didn't do something really stupid in my teenage years; I didn't want…

— Leigh Newman

My natural inclination is to think in scenes. So that's how I write, and the issue for me is usually: what to…

— Leigh Newman

The tough thing is how to cultivate a life where the paramecium of happiness gets a lot of chances to get out…

— Leigh Newman

There's a kind of intimacy that happens between a mother and an only child. Which only gets more intimate when it's between…

— Leigh Newman

My dad felt pretty strongly that I know about the basic workings of a plane and so he taught me how to…

— Leigh Newman

Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from…

— Leigh Newman

After my parents divorced, my father remarried and my brothers were born when I was twelve and sixteen. I was thunderstruck at…

— Leigh Newman

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

— Leigh Newman

“Can't lives on won't street.”

— Leigh Newman

“If you can't be yourself with yourself, how can you be you with other people?”

— Leigh Newman

“That's the thing about parents, I'm beginning to realize. You don't have to see them all that much to imitate them.”

— Leigh Newman

When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book,…

— Leigh Newman

You see things really different when your father is so intimately, so indisputably in charge of your continued existence on the planet.

— Leigh Newman

I would hit a scene about my mother screaming at me during her breakdown, drunk or using pills, and she'd turn into…

— Leigh Newman

Most kids who grow up in Alaska and spend a fair degree of time in the wilderness, grow up being pretty self-reliant.…

— Leigh Newman

If you want to write in a mature and interesting way, you have to have sympathy for everyone that's involved.

— Leigh Newman

There was always some germ of joy, some little paramecium of happiness wriggling around, waiting for a chance to get out.

— Leigh Newman

Maybe it's easier to think about dishonesty and what kind of trouble you can get into as a writer when love and…

— Leigh Newman

I've managed to create intimacy with people I know, and people that I don't know. The longer things stay inside of us,…

— Leigh Newman