“My mind is a little mentally distorted right now,” she said in voice as creaky as a haunted-house staircase. And she had already cried twice that day, she said: once on Howard Stern’s radio show and again in the car after.

She wrested a palette from her makeup artist, kicked off her periwinkle stilettos and took a seat. Her affect was half brassy, half fragile, heavy on the id. Red hair flared across her shoulders. Her white tank top rode low. A nipple attempted to free itself.

Ms. Thorne, who grew up in Los Angeles and still lives there, had flown to New York City in late July to promote her book, “Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray,” a thin volume of prose poetry and sketches. She had written the acrostics and epigrams (“fall fast not easily”) in two weeks, she said, between calls to set on “Paradise City,” a television thriller.

“I’m a multitasker,” she said.

The poems meditate on her father’s death, the sexual molestation she said she endured as a child, her struggles with depression. She said that she was gunning for the best-seller list. She also said that her publisher, Rare Bird Books, had left out several key pages and messed up the order of the poems.