‘As nonfiction—that leftover term apotheosizing fiction—gets defined down as only memoir and essay, I’ve wanted to open it back up again, to claim it as virtually everything else.

Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn’t be more spacious, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be free to roam its expanses’ (p. 4).