Review: Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Simply put, I was too chicken to move to New York and pursue a career in writing. So when I heard about Sloane Crosley’s debut essay collection I was Told There'd Be Cake, I was eager to get a glimpse of the life that I skipped.

Read it cover to cover, and I am still not sure what I missed by heading to Texas instead of New York. The picture given in these essays are so close-up, so personal, and so self-focused that Crosley misses the opportunity to show the New York writing scene in a new light. And instead she chronicles the all too familiar tale of a twenty-something New Yorker who grew up in the suburbs and moved to the city to work in publishing. Like every other young, attractive, intelligent, single professional alone in New York, she experiences mean bosses, bad neighbors, and an unpleasant moving experience – breaking no new ground in terms of theme or content. But Crosley does offer some moments that that are witty and wry such as “…bringing him back to my bed made me feel like a prostitute whereas going to his place made me feel like a call girl.” She constructs strong sentences with vivid language and clever similes “Do unto others…was a concept that had slid off me like water off an oil-slicked baby seal’s back.”

Eloquent language and interesting syntax, however, cannot save this collection from shallowness and singularity; her lack of universally relatable stories turns her collection of essays into a compilation of a well-crafted diary entries. She fills the book with pop-culture references that are lost anyone even slightly over the age of 35 and that certainly will not stand the test of time. When she is not referencing 1990s computer games and movies, Crosley embraces self-absorption and self-indulgence. She reflects and contemplates too much, and it is not the type of reflection that is for the greater good of humanity, although she would like to think so. She writes: “…I can say with a solid degree of authority that I am a selfish person. I spontaneously forget the names of more people than not, unless I want to make out with them. I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice. I tip taxi drivers so poorly I'm amazed none of them have run over my foot while speeding off. Once I became so annoyed at a boyfriend's excessive use of my overpriced shea butter-based shampoo that I went out and bought him some Prell.”

She repeatedly babbles about mall life (“...mall as ecosphere” and “…our bubble-like mall existence would have to come to end…”), in hopes that she offers some higher metaphorical meanings. She doesn’t. Her essays reek of a sheltered young adulthood without enough distance from it to glean any meaningful message from her privileged suburban sanctuary although she tries repeatedly to understand, justify and exploit her white-picket-fence upbringing, particularly in “Bastard out of Westchester.”

Crosley reveals a blurred focal point in "Bastard out of Westchester." It is not the intentional post-modern kind but instead the “I don’t have a thesis statement” kind. The essay begins with the strange pronouncement that she wants to have a child born in Oostende or Antwerp. She explains: “This is where I want to raise my children—until the age, of say, ten, when I’ll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they’re fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move to them to place like Lansdale, Pennsylvania.” She splits this topic into a tangent about her one year of childhood in Australia followed by a somewhat complimentary digression about life in the suburbs. Her reflective paragraphs on the suburbs are the most poignant in the essay and are some of the best in the entire collection. She writes: “Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. Its purpose is to make it so you can identify with everything. We obviously grew up indentifying with nothing,” and concludes “…I came to understand that being born and raised in suburbia makes it difficult to lay claim to a specific type of childhood.” But unwillingly to let the essay end with that mature, honest, and introspective note that minimizes the incoherent logic at the beginning of the essay, she starts rambling about her name. This portion of the essay could have been written as a separate essay, put on her blog, or emailed to a friend. (Perhaps reflection on one’s name is just a natural act for twenty-somethings. When I was 21, I wrote an essay titled, “Call me Cornucopia,” which focused on my painfully common first and last names, how I was named after a soap character in the 70s, and how frustrating it was to attend college with someone who had the same name. I wanted a unique name like Cornucopia, but Sloane probably would have worked well too. Why is she complaining?) The disconnected subject matter that begins and ends the essay gives the entire piece a disjointed and forced perspective.

Perhaps "Bastard out of Westchester" suffers from Crosley’s use of compression. In her author’s note, she cops to using compression to bring pieces of stories together in a contained manner. Traditionally, compression may mean collapsing a week’s worth of events into a day or writing about three supporting characters instead of the seven who were there. Crosley, however, uses the type of compression performed by desperate college students who want to use the same paper for 2 classes. Like the kid who combines his history and political science papers into one mammoth catchall to satisfy two professors (or in my case, contrives a horrible comparison between As You like It and Crime and Punishment because I was taking Shakespeare and Russian literature in the same semester), Crosley throws together a bunch incomplete pieces to create a larger incomplete piece.

Like her essay about the suburbs, foreign-born children, and her unique name, "Ursula’s Cookie" also suffers from compression and feels like four separate essays. The first part reads like a Devil Wears Prada rip-off that focuses on her first grown-up job working assistant for a mean publisher boss. The second part, which reads like a scene out of absurdist theatre, shows her creating a cookie in the shape of her boss’s head; the third part focuses on a ridiculous lie about a family member’s death that leads to her eventual resignation; and, the fourth part shows her awkward resignation on September 11, 2001. The entire essay could have been framed about the insignificance of her unpleasant boss and trivial job in relation to the collapse of her surroundings, but instead her banal resignation on a tragically historic day makes for a quick and dreadfully quirky ending to an interminable piece about a drug dealing boyfriend, misshaped cookies, a dead aunt, and a living father. Perhaps the understatement is intentional, but most likely; the ending is swift because somber isn’t as cool as pithy and acerbic.

Crosely can be funny, caustic, and definitely self-deprecating. She makes herself the star of her show, but creates herself more as an uneven caricature than a well-rounded character. She portrays herself as a mean girl but tempers it with contrived, unbelievable benevolence (more to appeal to readers than to accurately reflect her true self). She makes herself the butt of her jokes, which ignites laughter but not empathy. Slapstick moments, gross-out jokes, and scathing comedic wisecracks summon snickers and sometimes genuine belly laughs, but rarely produce reader compassion. Likewise, she doesn’t give us any interesting supporting characters just a few funny quotes from her mother and sketchy portrayals of loser boyfriends and exasperating high school friends. She never moves the lens enough far away from herself to develop New York as a character or even as scenery. But at the same time, the lens is so close that it obscures her image. Readers of her 15 essays don’t really learn much about Sloane Crosley. In this collection, she is never a reliable, steadfast narrator but instead appears as the slightly drunk cute girl at a cocktail party who tells funny, embarrassing stories to pick up guys.

Sadly, Crosley achieves with her collection of essays the noncommittal, fly-by-night relationship that she desperately seeks in her essay, "One Night Bounce." In this essay, she expresses an obsession with one-night stands. Although, according to her comical account, she never succeeds in real life, she accomplishes this feat with her readers. She gives us a quick jolly with her funny quips about weddings in “You on a Stick”; violates us a little with “Smell This,” a somewhat gross tale about a mysterious piece excrement on her bathroom floor; and, makes us feel a bit of uncomfortable with revelations about her plastic toy collection in “The Pony Problem.” It was fun while it lasted but it doesn’t make us want to see her again unless maybe we’re bored and have nothing do the next time she puts out...a collection of essays.