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Unless you count cupcakes, condos and corporate bankruptcy, not much is manufactured on the island of Manhattan these days. But there is one thing New York has been spitting out with admirable consistency for well over a century: the It Girl.

Literary It Girls (which are the only kind I bother paying any attention to since the actress/model kind are boring) come in different packages but are always possessed of a irresistible trifecta of smarts, beauty and charm that causes half the world to fall in love with them and the other to want to scratch their eyes out - and in many cases both.

Sloane Crosley, 29, a publicist at Vintage/Random House and a freelance magazine writer, is the most recent incarnation of this admirable breed to bravely sally forth in her skinny jeans to shill a collection of comic essays. I Was Told There'd Be Cake is a compilation of 15 fizzy creative non-fictions about the unbearable lightness of being a good girl with bad intentions and vice versa.

Like many Lit It Girls before her, Crosley's takes as her subject herself, filtered self-deprecatingly through the foibles of modern urban singlehood. In the opening essay, The Pony Problem, she discloses her darkest secret: a kitchen cabinet full of plastic toy ponies, all given to her by ex-boyfriends under the impression they had come up with an original romantic response to her verbal tic, "What I really want is a pony!"

Okay, it's a little annoying. After all, I went through a phase of making that (admittedly lame) joke too and no boyfriend ever gave me a pony (toy or otherwise), which tells me that Crosley is either a) really pretty or b) really charming. And judging by the book, and its cover, she's both.

But I am not here to sneer. Truth is, there are lots of people who like to crap on books - and women - like this, but I am not one of them. Unlike most people who actually like to read such books, I am proud to admit it. For the record, I also like HP sauce on my eggs and Elton John's late stuff, and not in an ironic way either.

After all, young women who make their living writing comically about their personal pratfalls shouldn't criticize other young women who make their living doing the same. That would be mean and, in this particular case, openly envious.

Because let's be honest: I am envious of Crosley. So is everyone else. That's why It Girls (even of the literary variety, perhaps specifically of the literary variety) exist. Regardless of who they actually are (for the answer to that one you'd have to ask Crosley's close friend and ex, Moby), Lit Its give us a persona to aspire to. Why? Because they have all the same problems the rest of us do in our 20s and 30s, except on them all the angst, hangovers, neuroses and one-night stands are somehow cute.

Like the legion of Lit Its before her, Crosley is both a representation of - and reaction to - her day and age, in this case post-9/11 New York. Just as Dorothy Parker drank (1920s), Candace Bushnell social-climbed (1980s) and Elizabeth Wurtzel got depressed (1990s), Crosley bakes chocolate pear tarts for her college friends and is subsequently puzzled when one of them - she's not sure which - leaves a stray turd on her bathroom floor.

What I'm trying to say is she's kooky. And genuine. Jonathan Lethem blurbed her book and Joan Didion thinks she's nice. She makes cakes and jokes at her own expense and intricate dioramas representing her essays and posts them on her website at http://www.sloanecrosley.com. In a cultural moment when mildly eccentric authenticity is unusually revered - beating out glamour, social status and earnestness - it's a good time to be a witty, pretty, middle-class girl from Westchester. Crosley is making the most of it. And, really, why shouldn't she?

In the Observer's advance buzz-inducing profile of the author last year ("The Most Popular Publicist in New York"), Crosley's close girlfriend recounts the story of Sloane getting late-night drunken career advice from former It Girl Candace Bushnell. According to the friend, Bushnell "had Sloane by the shoulders and she was saying, 'You want a yacht, don't you?!' "

The story is chilling if only for it's Dickensian ghost of It Girl future connotations. After years of enduring low-grade public resentment over the commercial success of a TV show (Sex and the City) from which she has reportedly received no syndication profits, Bushnell seems a starved, brittle, collagen-injected version of her pre-Carrie Bradshaw self.

Crosley, for her part, would be wise to brace her delicate wrists against the coming onslaught of anti-It Girl envy. If the online buzz is any indication, she is in for a particular kind of drubbing reserved only for cute, wacky young female authors who dare tell funny stories about themselves. It's a mixture of love, hate and other people's socio-sexual frustrations, also known as envy.

But I bet Crosley can handle it. With or without a yacht.