The essayist Sloane Crosley has just published her second collection of witty, personal writing. And now HBO wants to make a TV series about her. So will she give up the day job now?
Emma Brockes , The Guardian, Thursday 15 July 2010
How Did You Get This Number
by Sloane Crosley
240pp,
Portobello Books Ltd, £11.99
Sloane Crosley, publicist by day, memoirist by night, has been said to "speak for her generation", so it's lucky the 31-year-old has so much to say. Her first book of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, sold 150,000 copies and is being considered by HBO as the basis for a TV series. (Marketing sell: "the lady Larry David".) Her followup collection, How Did You Get This Number?, recounts further adventures of her life in New York and she is working on a novel, her second – the first she put away in a drawer: "I should rename it Dear Grandchildren If You Publish This I'll Come Back From the Grave and Tear Your Eyes Out. A long title, but I think it works."
We are in Balthazar, a smart New York brasserie which, along with taxi cabs, disgusting flatmates, small apartments, reminiscences about childhood pets, mild behavioural tics and Crosley's strongest piece in the new book, an account of her disastrous affair with a cheating scumbag, feels like a staple of the wry personal anecdote, all told with the zippy air of the 90s newspaper column. ("Some people have coke guys. I had an upholstery guy.") If her whimsy runs out of control here and there – the first essay in I Was Told There'd Be Cake is about Crosley's adorable toy pony collection – she is, for the most part, sharp enough to get away with it, enlivening the funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the-fridge type jokes with the occasional standout image. In the new book she goes on holiday to Portugal, where she sees "ancient Portuguese ladies, their spines bobbing beneath their cardigans as they scaled the city's steep inclines".
Full piece at The Guardian.
No comments:
Post a Comment