You sort of want to hate Sloane Crosley. Especially if you're the kind of young writer who devours Vivian Gornick and SarahVowell and Meghan Daum. And then you really want to hate her because you see that Meghan Daum has blurbed her (what a weird, weird verb) and on the back of her book she's compared to no less than Dorothy Parker, David Sedaris, and oh yes, Sarah Vowell. Awesome.
But when you open up her little paperback original (beautifully designed, of course), ready for the hate to calcify, instead it just melts away. She's just too funny, just too honest, just too original. You'd hate her if you could, but you can't, so instead you love her. Especially for lines like these:
My father did this sometimes, so I recognized it—a tweaked out kind of racism in which one is abnormally accepting of others simply because they're different. To this day, he has a keen interest I how my black and gay friends are doing. He loves seeing old Chinese men and Mexican babies.
The side effects of growing up "just outside of [insert major urban center here]" are many but practically intangible. This is logical given the fact that suburbia itself is a side effect and practically intangible. For instance, suburban kids are uniquely mean. They don't have the dangers of drive-by shootings or shark attacks to put things into perspective. The poor aren't considered genuinely impoverished and the wealthy aren't rich rich. Everything is muted. Other side effects include but are not limited to: inadvertent house arrest until the age of eighteen, the mall as ecosphere, jingling car keys as status symbol, an intimate knowledge of golf courses but a lack of global awareness.
And the description of her childhood friend, Francine, going to a school dance in a dress made of pages of Seventeen and YM duct-taped to her body is the nail in the coffin for my anticipated but never realized hatred of Ms. Sloane. She calls the dress a "Betty Friedan paper doll."
Read it. And don't hate. She's just that good.
Next week: Without a Map by Meredith Hall and after that Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.
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I just got this from the library today! I'm really excited to read it now.
wait... i guess i don't understand why i was supposed to hate her in the first place. if i'm a young writer (which i am) who loves vivian gornick and sarah vowell (which i am also), and all of these things are leading up to my reading of the book, shouldn't i love her already? i mean, unless i am supposed to be jealous of her because she is being recognized and praised. i don't know why you're insinuating we have to hate other people (women specifically) who are successful and talented because they have what we want, unless they are just THAT good. you used the word hate an awful lot, and it was basically the tying theme of your piece. normally, i probably wouldn't even bat an eyelash at it, but i guess i didn't expect this sort of tone to come from a feministing article.
michelle, if you're not ever jealous of your fellow writers, than you're a bigger person than me. I was trying to be funny and honest about some of the natural competition that I think writers feel for one another. I don't think jealousy is inherently anti-feminist. It's human. How we deal with it, now there's a moment where we can fly our feminist flag (i.e. supporting talented writers and writing reviews of their books). Catch my drift?
I'm with Michelle. Why is being compared to David Sedaris a bad thing?