Janice Erlbaum is the author of GIRLBOMB (Villard, 2006), and a longtime columnist for BUST magazine (http://www.bust.com)). She lives in her native New York with her domestic partner, Bill Scurry, and their three cats. She is currently working on her second book, about her experiences a volunteer at a shelter for homeless teens.

On leaving home at fifteen...

Actually, I first left home at nine. I was living with my father in New Jersey for a few months, because my mother was busy with her re-marriage and her stepkids, and I ran away with another girl from my fourth-grade class. We packed our bags with extra food and our teddy bears and some stolen pocket change, and hit the road one day during school lunch. We didn't have a destination in mind; we just set off to find a new family. Because I'd been driven from New York to New Jersey so often, I was able to navigate us from our school to the New Jersey turnpike, which we entered, walking along the grassy embankments on the southbound side for a half mile or so until we encountered a tollbooth, and several uniformed police officers firmly descended upon us. We were reunited with our parents that afternoon. Of course, I made the same mistake again at fifteen - set off to find a new family, with no destination in mind. This time it took over a year to get back home. Thank god the police weren't involved.

On mothers and forgiveness...

My mother was my age - thirty-six years old - when she met my abusive stepfather and had an unplanned son with him. At the time, she had two ex-husbands, no living parents, and me, an emotionally troubled thirteen-year-old daughter. It's impossible for me to imagine myself in her situation; then again, it's impossible for me to imagine making her choices. I know she regrets those choices, and I accept that regret. I'm grateful for what she was able to do for me, and sad for what she wasn't. Writing this book gave me a lot of compassion for her. I would like for my mother to be happy.

On New York City summers...

I lost my virginity to a lifeguard from Rockaway Beach in the summer of 1984, when I was fourteen, on a catamaran off the coast of "Rockapulco," Playland Beach 98. He was nineteen, blond, and gorgeous � in the Queens accent, he was a "life-god," and he was certainly godlike to me. He didn't even like me, but I was thrown in as a package deal with my slutty friend Karlina, who was having sex with another guard. It was one of the most painful things I'd ever been through, like tearing your fingernail too low on the bed. Afterwards, he was furious that I'd been a virgin and not told him. "You're too young," he told me. "You're trouble." Which I was. I brought the news proudly back to Karlina's towel. "I fucked him, and it was awesome." Next summer, Rockaway Playland burned down. Then we started going to Coney.

On group therapy...

I don't know about actual group therapy, but the brutal exercises in social manipulation practiced by many juvenile group homes and institutions really border on the abusive. Imagine a twelve-step meeting, except after you "shared" all about your pain and sadness, everybody in the group jumped down your throat and screamed at you and called you an asshole, and then shunned you for a week. Belittling, humiliating, manipulating � there's no compassion, no deep listening; it's appalling. I don't know a single person who's been through this kind of "therapy" and been better for it. Whereas good therapy, one-on-one talk therapy, saved my life. My book is dedicated to my therapist of the past eleven years, Judith.

On porn in Times Square...

One of the stories I had to leave out of the book concerned a white girl named Angie, who had run away from Georgia to find the Marine who knocked her up, or something. She showed up at the shelter with three tapestry suitcases full of clothes, which had to be kept in the counselors' office, or they would have been stolen directly off her back. She was a rube, and kind of a berserk one � she buddied up to me right away, as the only other white girl, and she wanted me to do things with her like steal credit cards and visit the morgue ("Really! I done it before! It'll be fun!"). She was at the shelter for about a week before she took off for Florida with a pimp named Freddie. Just another Georgian on Times Square's infamous "Minnesota Strip."

On the high life...

It's so depressing to me that I can finally afford the kind of lifestyle that involves hanging out in clubs and trying to stand near famous people, and I don't want it. Seventeen-year-old me is screaming at me, like, "I can't believe you look forward to staying home and watching reality TV shows! Go hang out at clubs and see if somebody will recognize us as a writer!" I still have a career aptitude survey I took in my senior year of high school, where I identified my career goal as "nightclub owner." Now I would rather put a pen in my eye than stand around in a crowded club full of cokeheads, drunks, and disaffected seventeen-year-old girls.

On guilty pleasures...

Oh! I have those. Televisionwithoutpity.com, definitely. Not guilty because it�s anything less than sublime; guilty because I should be working when I'm reading it. Competitive reality TV. The candy bowl at my writer's room. Singing along to Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson. With feeling. I went through a web sudoku phase, but I can't afford the time anymore. And mushrooms, in theory, though it's been years.

On house parties with the "boyses"...

I was one of those third-wave, post-feminist, "I'm tough, so I identify with men more than women" women, very early on. I loved hanging out with a group of guys, and feeling guy-like. The Boyses was a clique of popular guys on the high school party scene, and for a while, our orbits overlapped. I tried to make myself sort of a mascot to the group, which was undermined by my habit of sleeping with various members. Later, I would reproduce this dynamic by working at a mostly-male dotcom, a mostly male magazine, and another mostly-male dotcom around the turn of the millennium. Finally, around the age of thirty, I realized, "I hate beer, and I hate porn. What am I doing here?"

On awakenings...

I think my most recent awakening was that I want to reconnect with the sense of wonder and awe I had for life as a child. I was a very profoundly oriented kid; I thought a lot about death and morality and purpose on earth, even though I had no religious upbringing, and both my parents were entirely pragmatists, not "spiritually" oriented at all. And it bugs me that I lost my own religion, the one I made up and felt devoutly; the one where it felt good to be good, and bad to be bad. I have friends who believe in god, friends with faith, friends who consider themselves "very spiritual," and I've always just been this undefined atheist. So I've been going through a spiritual reawakening lately. I hope it won't be my last.

On Covenant House...

Covenant House is an organization I respect very much � they're on the front lines of teenage homelessness. They're nationwide (also in Canada and Central America), and they provide a very high percentage of emergency services (food, shelter, medical and legal help) to teenage kids in need. They're a private charity taking up a huge part of the slack in the social services system � without them, these kids would have nothing. I donate frequently at covenanthouse.com

On writing a memoir...

Well, A.M. Homes just came out with a book called This Book Will Save Your Life. And I've joked to people that I should write an article about publishing Girlbomb called, "This Book Will Ruin Your Life." Writing the fucking thing was hard enough � I thought I was narcoleptic; I slept so much from emotional exhaustion. Publishing it hasn't been easy, either. Some family members were not happy about how they were portrayed. Some people from high school were not thrilled either. It sucks, because I really did not want to be hurtful to anyone; I loved all my family and friends and the girls I lived with, very much. I tried to spare people some embarrassment, and protect their privacy, by using some composites, but I don't think that really saved anybody's feelings from being hurt, in the end. I wish it were possible to write about your life without writing about other people; it's not. It has to be done, so we try to do it with empathy.

On love...

I just got domestically partnered last year to someone so good - so wonderful and compassionate and smart and funny and handsome and good � that I would like to clone him, so that everybody can have a Bill of their own. I'd make gay Bills for the gay boys, and female ones for the lesbians; you could customize the outside of your Bill to make him look however you liked. But inside, it'd be 100 percent good. Total love. That's one of the things I said in my vows to him � "You're everything I want for everyone I love." Sadly, I didn't mention anything in my vows about lesbian clones.

On next projects...

I'm working like hell on my next book, another true story, about going back to the shelter where I lived as a kid � this time, as a volunteer. I met a resident there, an incredibly bright, incredibly damaged nineteen-year-old junkie savant, and she and I forged an unshakable bond over the next few months. I followed her through detox wards, psych wards, rehabs, halfway houses, and hospital rooms, eventually offering to adopt her and become her legal guardian, as she suffered a mysterious autoimmune syndrome. But then I discovered her real identity � and her real illness � and�you'll have to read it, winter 2007-08.