I would love it if my book was considered chick-lit or a beach read. That would be great. People would buy my book.

When you write in the third person, you get to imagine other people's 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.

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.

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

I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated. Any time people have an argument about them, they're arguing about something that doesn't exist in any meaningful way that has to do with style or substance or actual content of books.

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