My colleague John Updike said very aptly in a memoir he wrote recently, "Shame is not for writers." He's right. It's not that one doesn't feel shame or that one is shameless, but it's to be struggled against.

Fiction has an obligation to be about those things that we're too ashamed to talk about with those we trust the most. ... But it's the things you don't even want to say to the people you trust that constitute a big portion of your real life. And I think fiction--at least my kind of fiction--is about that. There is an act of self-removal writers are capable of that may look inhumane.