About a year ago, a guy from Chicago called and asked if he could adapt my book The Terrible Girls for the stage.

My first reaction was surprise. Seventeen years after the first of my eight books was published, I still never believe that anyone actually reads my work. I have this idea--supported by the pathetic money I get for them (this year's combined royalty checks totaled $271.41)--that my books go out into the world, and, besides my friends, nobody reads them. My second reaction was gratitude: Not only had someone I didn't know actually read my work, but he liked it so much that he wanted to do something with it.

Then I began to worry.

A few times before people had asked to adapt pieces of mine for theater. The first time, the spouse of a friend was teaching performance studies at a university and wanted to turn a story of mine into a show. The university flew me down to see the show. The student actors were talented and the audiences seemed to like the piece. The people who didn't like it complained that they didn't want their university supporting lesbian filth. (In that place and time--Georgia, 1991--"lesbian" was synonymous with "filth.") The straight feminist director had expected this and responded firmly, with intelligence and grace, to the bigots and morons in her school and town.

But then there was the woman who did a one-person show based on one of my books wearing lots of what looked like ketchup slathered all over her. Next up, a guy asked to make a film adaptation of my book Forgiveness, turning the lesbian couple into a straight couple. I said no.

So I was skeptical when Kyle Hall called. I was also curious how anyone would turn this particular book, The Terrible Girls, into a play. In it, a woman cuts off her lover's arm; big fat dykes on bikes crash their motorcycles into a Merchant-Ivory-type debutante ball; a woman's cut-up heart, hands, and thighs are sent to her via the U.S. Postal Service; two women get trampled by a pack of horses; and a female Dr. Frankenstein rips the heart out of her romantically dead girlfriend. It's a violent, gory book, and I didn't want the gore rendered literally on stage.

But when I learned that Kyle had been a student of Mary Zimmerman, I tossed my reservations out the window. Zimmerman's recent Seattle production of The Metamorphosis was among the most visually stunning, emotionally evocative things I'd ever seen in my life. Kyle offered me $500 up front for limited adaptation rights and a teeny percentage of the box-office receipts. I would be flown to Chicago, put up in a hotel for one night, and given 10 comp tickets.

I told Kyle that he could do whatever he wanted with my work.

The show opened in mid-April, and I was there for the last preview, on a Sunday night. I sat in the balcony, far away from everyone else. In addition to being crazy and surreal, The Terrible Girls is also an emotional autobiography of one of the shittiest periods of my life. All that violence--hearts and limbs being ripped apart--was how I felt for a long time, and I was nervous about revisiting that part of my life.

But hearing other people say words I had written, and enact visual symbols I had imagined, completed something for me. Listening to these fine actors (the Chicago cast was a gang of eight tremendously fierce, agile women), I got a sense of my story as no longer only mine. In the final scene, the images of light I had written about were realized with shafts of light coming up through traps and down from above. It was redemptive for me to see something that had been so secret and shameful turned into something that made sense to others.

I saw the show a few more times during the week I spent in Chicago. A couple of times I saw it with friends who knew me when my life was the shithole that gave rise to The Terrible Girls. I felt a tremendous sense of gratitude in having survived those times and being able to witness (with some of the folks who saw me through that period) their transformation into a piece of theater. After all these years and all these books, I still keep learning that art can show how we live through terrible things and still come out whole and grateful.