And so, with a stunning lack of impressive options, I nominate Sloane Crosley; author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, a collection I personally believe should be required reading for college students.
There is something about Sloane Crosley that is endearing. Infallibly, almost annoyingly so. It's not that she's a perfect, stellar heroine. In fact, she's far from it. Sloane Crosley is....well....she's a bad person.
She's a bad person in the way that we all are. She is the little demon inside of us that laughs when people trip over cracks in the sidewalk or drop an armful of papers into an unforgiving wind. She is the same kind of bad person that I was with my first independently owned pet and the feline love of my life. I would watch Milo, my wonderfully loving but also mentally retarded cat, play on the edge of the bathtub. I knew he would fall in, and I knew that if I were to just stop him and set him back on the floor, I would save him all sorts of anguish. But at the same time, there was an orange fluffball with horrific balance teetering just inches from a pool of water. I loved the cat desperately. I really did. But damn it, I wanted to see him fall, even if it meant him dripping all over my bedspread.
In that way, there is a little bit of Sloane in each of us.
The book is a collection of “essays” (short stories? Autobiographical snippets? Vignettes? Take your pick, really) that cover a wide range of topics centered around Sloane's life in suburban New York. She is, on one hand, a spoiled, bratty JAP (I can say this, of course, because I'm Jewish myself), playing with her mother's jewelery and wishing she had long blond hair like all of her school friends. If you've never been a young Jewish kid in a mainly WASP environment, you cannot truly understand the lament of your “Jew-fro” snapping through combs as your mother yells yiddish words up towards the God hiding somewhere beyond the ceiling fan. On the other hand, Sloane is trying her best to be a good person (without going out of her comfort zone, of course), a good employee, a good friend. We see the common themes of maturation, loss of innocence, a widening of the childhood “bubble” through real-life experiences. So what makes Cake different?
Simply put? Everything. I went in expecting the worst. The first essay, titled simply The Pony Problem, had visions of a wealthy upper-crust equestrian middle schooler dancing through my head. That is to say, I began expecting to dislike Sloane. To loathe her, really.
“I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day.”
And there it was. Suddenly Sloane was off her high horse (the horse, of course, being both metaphorical and literal). She was suddenly just another girl raised in an upper-middle class suburban neighborhood by a loving, simultaneously overprotective and still aloof, religiously confused set of parents. She was struggling to be on her own, overwhelmed by the city, surprisingly unprepared to deal with the consequences of paying ones own grocery bills. We were sitting on my floor, eating ice cream from the carton, discussing our obsessive compulsive fears.
“Say someone pushes me onto the subway tracks. Or I get accidentally blown up. Or a woman with a headset and a baby carriage wheels over my big toe, backing me into some scaffolding, which shakes loose a lead pipe, which lands on my head. What then? After the ambulance, the hospital, the funeral, the trays of cheese cubes on foil toothpicks...”
From then on it was clear that Sloane Crosley and I were going to get along just fine. The Pony Problem goes on to explain that this fear of untimely death has brought our narrator to dump an incriminating bag of plastic ponies on the city subway, in fear that a surviving relative will uncover the dirty secret. In her mind, Mama Crosley will be cleaning out the kitchen, crying quietly, when she will discover the drawer of stashed horses. The revelation will be so odd and discomforting for the grieving mother that she will promptly forget all of the wonderful things about her daughter and remember her as a plastic pony loving freak. So, obviously, the ponies had to be disposed of.
“I think about burying them in the park but have my doubts about the ponies' biodegradability. I think about burning them, melting them into a puddle of plastic as their real-life counterparts were once melted into glue. Maybe I'll just sneak out to the reservoir after dark with a raft made from pool noodles and rubber bands and give them a Viking funeral.”
Through a series of fifteen short essays (ranging from about six pages to about twenty) Sloane brings us with her through some of the most entertaining, humiliating, and eye-opening moments of her adolescence. These are places most of us have been – the first time we learn what sex really is, the first time we realize we're truly “different”, that day we accidentally locked ourselves out of our apartment...twice. Most of the time I found myself thinking, What a hilarious and creative situation! Then I sat and thought about it some more, and realized... wait. That's happened to me before. Why didn't it seem so charming firsthand?
In fact, my main complaint about I Was Told There'd be Cake was that it made me feel like a rather boring and uncreative person. Why isn't my life narrated in witty, snippy quips and paragraphs? The book is flat out funny. The collection reads the way we all wish our diaries did. It makes the drama and the confusion of growing up clear – the exploration of feelings and experiences, the moment each cloud disintegrates and you get just a little bit closer to the ground,losing your halo along the way – but makes it extremely entertaining. Finally, a way to laugh at someone else suffering those same miserable rites of passage without feeling guilty!
Sloane's essays are like a big helping of fast food. It's so good while you're reading it that you hardly slow down to think of what the consequences will be. Thankfully, the repercussions of Cake aren't as bad as those of a McDonalds value meal. Between its jokes, the book includes some creative, warm thoughts on life, love, and growing up.
“Go to college, pick a major, get a boyfriend, a job, an interesting scar, a dream house, an educated position on the death penalty. Suddenly you [have] more mail, more keys, more passwords, more toiletries. And all for less praise. People are less quick to applaud as you grow older. Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. If you think about it, it's a miracle that we get out of bed every day and brush our teeth and remember to buy toothpaste. We all deserve to be congratulated but sadly that would mean there's no one else to do the congratulating.”
Don't worry, the scale of humor versus lesson tips heavily in the favor of comedy. In You on a Stick, Sloane is asked by a distant high school friend to be a member of her bridal party. A single 26 year old girl, living alone in the city, forced to help out at a wedding, desperately drunk and lonely – here is a snapshot we are shown again and again. Now turn the picture upside down, squint your eyes a little, and dim the lights. That is more of the snapshot that we get.
“One day I woke up in my midtwenties and boom: I was attending [a wedding] every three months. It was an epidemic and I was invited. […] I was a duck-billed platypus, begging Noah to let me on the ark, but he refused because my other duck-billed platypus was riding the baggage claim carousel at the foot of the dock. […] If I had any remote inclination toward marriage – not an unhealthy Bridget Jones fascination, but the fundamental idea of someday finding my other duck-billed platypus and maybe buying a magazine for duck-billed platypuses – this would have been cruel.”
You will notice that there is a word I use often on this blog as a sort of ultimate reward for authors. Refreshing. It defined the poetry of Theresa Williams' novel, the romance between Corelli and Pelagia, the passion Peekay felt for boxing. And it runs rampant in I Was Told There'd be Cake. Every page is fresh, funny, and completely out of left field. Where else can you spend a solid eight pages playing private detective to solve the mystery of who left a “perfect, cherry-sized turd on your bathroom carpet?” Learn about the dark sides of butterflies and volunteering? Correctly deduce if you are crazy for your private thoughts about sex, “dream[s] there [is] no harm in believing (provided one kept their wits and prophylactics about them)?”
Sloane is young and creative, and doesn't mind raising a few eyebrows with her essays. She's not afraid to offend, and she's doesn't seem terribly concerned about people knowing she went actively searching for a one night stand, or that she's not a “hard-core” vegetarian (“As a lifestyle once kept between a select few and that now has many coming out of the freezer, being a vegetarian in New York is not unlike being gay”). I have found that when the writer isn't afraid to put him or herself up on the chopping block, it takes the book to a whole new level. In my opinion, if you want to write something great, you can't be too embarrassed to admit that you once baked and decorated a cookie in the likeness of your boss' head, somehow convinced that that would finally get you into her good graces (yes, that happened... check page 43).
Sloane is the girl that we all want to be. She is confident, unashamed, hilarious, a thought-provoking mixture of optimistic and pessimistic. She is willing and able to admit her flaws, but can tell you just as fast why she is utterly fantastic. She loves her family and they love her back, but from a respectful (perhaps cautious?) distance. Her boyfriends love her enough to buy her plastic ponies – thus causing The Pony Problem – but she is so independent and happy on her own that her parents think she is a lesbian. She is sharp, hard working, and can spin a pun so wicked that you'll be dizzy for pages.
Isn't that the kind of voice you would want representing your generation?
“Because this is the beauty of strangers: we're all just doing our best to help each other out, motivated not be karma but by a natural instinct to aid the greater whole, one stray clothing tag at a time. Except for the curmudgeonly guy on the corner of Thirteenth and Seventh who saw me smoking a cigarette and told me it would kill me. Asshole.”
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