20 Quotes by Emily Gould

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

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

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 don’t think being a lawyer is more or less valuable than being a writer.

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

But she was too scared, or too busy, or too distracted, or just too tired, to do what was necessary to make her dreams come true.

Amy had always thought she was too vain and selfish to seriously contemplate suicide, also too afraid of pain. She realized now that when she’d thought that, she hadn’t understood how painful existence could get. It could get so painful, it turned out, that any other kind of pain began to seem preferable. She felt ridiculous thinking these goth-teenager thoughts, but they were real.

I think that genre distinctions basically boil down to marketing categories, which are outdated.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

Maybe she had assumed that what she and Sam had was veering in a permanent direction because they were at an age when people got married. She thought suddenly of how often during their relationship they’d found themselves surrounded by other couples, functioning as a unit and finding that it was easier to do so. Because couples were what society wanted, what it was built for. But maybe they hadn’t simply been moving toward anything, maybe they had simply been coasting on inertia.