Sloane CrosleySeth Wenig/The Associated Press
You don't have to live in Manhattan or work in the publishing business to get into print. But it can't hurt to have Dave Eggers and Joan Didion in your sphere of influence. By day, Sloane Crosley is a popular Random House publicist who reps both authors. In her downtime, she's just released her second collection of essays, How Did You Get This Number, the follow-up to her bestselling I Was Told There'd Be Cake. Crosley's first book garnered much press and praise, and comparisons to David Sedaris, Nora Ephron and Dorothy Parker.
Which raises two questions: Can Crosley live up to the hype, and are critics referencing Sedaris from his late-1990s Naked era? I preferred him when he was irritably cleaning other people's houses instead of adopting pet spiders at his French country villa.
Vintage Nora Ephron is also a much better read than Crosley's second effort. I'll take Ephron's collection Crazy Salad over her current impenetrable New Yorker musings about the umlaut. As for Dorothy Parker, she remains the gold standard for satirists. No woman under 50 should rightly be compared to Parker until she's logged a few more boozy, disappointing years in New York City.
Young Crosley's Lana-Turner-discovered-at-the-soda-shop moment began as an innocent mass e-mail about locking herself out of two apartments on moving day. The e-mail found its way to editor Ed Park of The Village Voice, who told Crosley to clean it up so he could use it.
More essays followed and I Was Told There Would Be Cake was published in 2008. HBO snapped up the television rights and the collection was nominated for a Thurber Prize for American Humor.
The only designer label that hasn't yet stuck to Sloane Crosley is chick-lit. She fits the bill - SWF, 31, Manhattan area code, ûber-publicist, saucy brunette - but that's not how she's being sold to readers. The ambitious Crosley has wisely aimed her lofty sights beyond the crumbling façade of the vapid Sex and the City franchise.
There are some great one-liners in this collection, yet there are also some weaknesses. No clichéd New York coming-of-age experience is spared: Crosley dissects puke-encrusted cabs, cramped sublets, mean girls, disappointing collegiate trips to Paris and cheating suitors.
In An Abbreviated Set of Tongues, a mordant yet uneven story about her late family pets, Crosley opens with a clever insider reference to Jackie Kennedy's cat-crazy, spinster cousins from Grey Gardens. This disjointed account quickly loses steam as unnecessary subheads break up the cadence of the narrative. In the end, it's just a great one-liner followed by a trite laundry list of dead pets.
In Take a Stab at It, she explores the familiar terrain of the young renter with a clever reference to modern art: "They divided spaces that were never meant to be divided. It was like splitting a wasabi pea in half with your thumb. Doors opened into bed corners more often than not. … All immediate hints of purpose went out of rooms themselves. Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter."
Crosley is at her best when she occupies the fringes. Light Pollution takes her to Alaska for a friend's wedding. As soon as she arrives at the airport, Crosley begins to gather material: "As I came down the escalators, there was a person in a polar bear plushy suit, wearing a Native American headdress on top and handing out flyers. As he wordlessly pointed me towards the exit, I thought, Where is David Lynch when you need him?"
Other highlights of the collection include a travel piece called Show Me On The Doll, where the lonely Crosley encounters a friendly clown troupe in a Lisbon bar, and Off the Back of a Truck about her moral quandary as she secures stolen designer goods to decorate her apartment and discovers her new boyfriend is in a common-law relationship.
This feisty author gets full marks for self-disclosure, yet How Did You Get This Number does not live up to the publicity. There is just too much banal padding in this collection for me to give it an unequivocal rave.
Patricia Dawn Robertson squandered her youth checking coats and reading Nora Ephron.