This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Elisa Albert, whose first book of essays, The Snarling Girl, is out today from Clash Books. In sixteen essays, Albert reflects on everything from the creative process to reproductive justice, ambition to Ani DiFranco, Judaism to the ethos of punk, all while building a home in Albany, New York. Samantha Irby calls Albert “heartfelt, rigorous, and delightfully self-aware.” Elisa Albert is the author of the novels Human Blues (Simon & Schuster, 2023), After Birth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) The Book of Dahlia (Free Press, 2009), and the story collection How This Night Is Different (Free Press, 2008). She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the College of Saint Rose, Bennington College, Texas State University, the University of Maine, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A Pushcart Prize nominee, a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize and the Paterson Fiction Prize, winner of the Moment Magazine debut fiction prize, and a Literary Death Match champion, Albert has served as writer-in-residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Holland and at the Hanse-Wissenschaftkolleg in Germany.
Elisa Albert, author of The Snarling Girl.
1. How long did it take you to write The Snarling Girl?
The essays were written over the course of a dozen years, in between novels and other stuff.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Gathering all the essays up and seeing how they hung together in conversation with each other. Each piece was written as a stand-alone, so it was pretty chill, compared to writing a novel. Writing essays served as palate-cleansers while I was lost in the maze of something longer.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
Wherever, whenever, however. Laptop, notebook, coffee shop, airplane, train, library, couch, bed. Pen, paper, AirBook Pro, voice memo, catch as catch can.
4. What are you reading right now?
1974 by Francine Prose, The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen, The Psychological Bases of War edited by Winnik, Moses, and Ostow, Psalms, All Fours by Miranda July, and a two-inch-square ten-page pamphlet/zine I found entitled Grief… Reminders for Healing by Gale Massey, M.S.
5. Which author or authors have been influential for you, in your writing of this book in particular or as a writer in general?
Helen Garner, Abigail Thomas, Lucia Berlin, Erma Bombeck, and Emmanuel Carrere.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of The Snarling Girl?
That my obsessions turn out to be trustworthy guides, and posturing isn’t worthwhile. I don’t have to go too far afield to find fascinations. I don’t have to invent or embroider interest. It’s enough to be genuinely, openly curious about the parameters of the self in (or outside of) community. Not to invent a “self” but to confront it, as it exists in (or outside of) community.
7. What is one thing your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
That I’m stubbornly inconsistent in my use of quotation marks.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Snarling Girl, what would you say?
Don’t forget to have a good time. Stay loose. Enjoy the labor. Follow through. Fear not to lose for want of cunning; weep not; heaven’s not always got by running, quoth Psalms.
9. What forms of work, other than writing, did you have to do to complete this book?
Doula training and practice, teaching literature and writing at the college and graduate level, raising a family, making home(s) in exile, lots of yoga, constant reading.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t shy away from the hard stuff. Keep a low overhead. Change the font and spacing for editing. Read aloud. Keep going. Kill your darlings. Show don’t tell. Process over product. (Not that I necessarily follow any of it.)
