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.

Women especially are trained to protect other people's feelings, and a lot of that involves not telling the truth even about the fundamental details of your own experiences and your own life.

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

I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated.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.

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

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