Nothing trains you better to write fiction than being really good at writing about your own interiority.

To some extent the shorter the writing assignment is, the harder it is to accomplish, and a blurb is 200 words max. Blurbs are meaningless, and actual people who are buying the books don't care about them at all.

Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both.

No one ever addresses the possibility that a writer might not like her book.

Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

I can look back and recognize the things I've done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking, et cetera. Sometimes the wrongness was even clear at the time, though not as clear as it is now. But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory, a sense of experience piling up the way it does as you turn the pages of a novel. I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again.

I think that people are generally really terrible at being ambassadors of their own work.