I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.

Growing up I was always feeling like an outsider, being Greek in communities that were not very ethnic. I felt like an outsider in the Greek community, too, because women were expected to behave and socialize in a certain way, and I didn't. Also being an actor I felt like an outsider, because not many Greek American women were actors then. But once you realize that you are an outsider, there can be a freedom in that. You can find your own way.

Even when I'm in a scene I don't think of myself as being in the scene. I'm very conscious of myself being an outsider. I think that has to do with my upbringing outside of the US – not just my heritage but that I grew up differently. I moved to a different country every year or every other year…a lot of different places due to my father's occupation.

I’m an outsider. I will always be an outsider.

I've always felt like something of an outsider. I've always had friends, but I've always come from an outside point of view. I think that's important. If you grow up gay, or in a household that's agnostic, when most people are religious, then from the get-go, you are saying that there are things that the majority of society believes that I don't believe.

I lived most of my life feeling like an outsider. I remember in second grade being bullied, taunted and beaten up. I am bicultural, biracial – my mother is Japanese and my father is caucasian. I grew up in Connecticut; it was a fairly white culture and I grew up thinking I was Japanese. Then when I went to Japan I realised that I was American. That was shocking but also a wonderful completion, realising that I was neither here nor there but occupied some liminal space, neither in one culture or the other. That's a great vantage point.

When I was a kid, I never felt like I fit anywhere. I felt like an outsider in almost every situation, like an alien in my own family. There were times when being queer and closeted, when being Black and Puerto Rican, meant I felt hyper-visible and invisible all at once. You can see some of this in the book. I spent most of my adolescence hiding who I was, pretending to be someone else. There were times when I thought that what I wanted most was to be ordinary. An ordinary girl. And then something shifted. As I fell deeper into depression, as I got angrier and angrier, I thought an ordinary girl was the worst thing you could possibly be. It was much more about negotiating girlhood, a certain kind of girlhood, and what that meant. By the end of the book, there’s an acceptance, as I embrace the kind of girl I was, and realize that these ordinary girls were capable of amazing feats. They saved me—their friendship, their love. They anchored me.

I think that being an outsider has been very important for me because it made it possible for me to take a different look at the world we live in and at my place in it.

I’ve never really defined myself by a single identity—and in these times where identity means so much, I sometimes feel like I’m a bit of an outsider to every identity. Perhaps that makes me uniquely suited to writing about teens, who often feel on the outside

I get a kick out of being an outsider constantly. It allows me to be creative. I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me.

I very much have always felt like an American… People were like, ‘Oh, you’re so Eastern European.’ I was like, ‘I’m so L.A.!

Relish the opportunity to be an outsider. Embrace that label.

When I later came to the U.S., I was a foreigner. And I wasn’t part of Mexico, either. I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere.

I've always been fairly confident in what I feel and think. And part of that I think is coming from the Bay Area, where, you know, being an individual was very celebrated. Our culture of the Bay Area is a place where you want to be different. You want to be seen. You want to be heard. You want—there, conformity is the worst thing that you could aspire to.