Courtney Thorne-Smith, best known as the saccharine, drunk, Billy-smitten Allison Parker on Melrose Place, is the latest celebrity to try impersonating an author.

Her novel, Outside In, coming out this September on Broadway, tells the story of Kate Keyes-Morgan, a kind-hearted actress working on a prime-time soap in cruel, heartless Hollywood. (Smith obviously scoured the far corners of her imagination to come up with the lead character and premise.) When Kate's egomaniacal husband/manager leaves her for a narcissistic, diva costar, Sapphire Rose (Again! Courtney mines her rich fantasy life), Kate "begins to question her role in an industry that venerates appearance, money, and fame above all else" and finds her, you guessed it, inner strength.

Take away lessons: 1. CTS has a problem with food; 2. CTS has a problem with her mother; 3. CTS has a problem with Heather Locklear ; 4. CTS is probably a nice person. Evidence after the jump ...

1. On eating disorders
"She never looked quite real to herself. She often felt ... as if she was watching an actress in a movie. Today's movie was about a weak girl who couldn't control her appetite: a bad girl whose hunger was bigger than she was, bigger than the whole world."

"She'd been dubbed too fat in the press, other actress were criticized for being too thin. Was there a magic number, a secret weight of universal love?"

"A snack is just what I need. Then I can be fat, lose my career altogether and have nothing but time for getting to know the real me. Well, I know the real me and she is fat and lonely and even her mother doesn't want to be seen with her in public."

2. On bad mamas
"At the time of her very public humiliation, she had looked to her mother for the oft-advertised unconditional love that a mother is supposed to shower on her children like a broken water main, but had found only tiny drops of tolerance, tinged with impatience and disappointment."

"I really think you should book a series of colonic irrigation treatments, and get started on them as soon as possible, I think we can still hold out a faint hope that your belly bulge is nothing more than excess waste."

"Shooting you from behind has never been a good idea. Of course I blame your father for that. Genetics can be cruel."

3. On Sapphire/Heather
"[Sapphire] made working on Generations feel like a Chinese torture chamber, complete with the subtle terror of never knowing what specific pain lay in store each day. Some days, Sapphire would even be well-prepared and pleasant, which really threw everybody off. Most days though, she was raging, either from a fight with one of her young boyfriends, an unflattering photo in a magazine, or—even worse—no photo in a magazine."

"They're just jealous, jealous and incapable of the compassion and empathy needed to see how grueling it is to live with the constant pressure of my extraordinary talent."

4. On being a nice, rational celebrity
"The only thing more boring than a do-gooder celebrity is a dieting celebrity. God forbid they combine and become the truly terrifying hybrid of the celebrity who is trying to do good by sharing their diet secrets."

"She had learned from painful experience that even love can look like constipation if the actor is trying to illustrate the emotion through facial expressions alone."

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