"I think that even in autobiographical writing your job is to create illusion, to work with rhythm and image and detail to make the reader feel that whatever is on the page matters and must have happened. The problem if you write directly and only from experience is that experience is thin and has no shape. For "Sleep," I expect readers to imagine that something happened, enough to become the emotional bedrock of the story, a story that deals with what are, for me, pressing images."

What is he saying and make a connection with his story sleep