Sloane Crosley on chick lit, plastic ponies, and the downsides of good publicity

This April Fool's Day, Riverhead will publish I Was Told There'd Be Cake, a book of personal essays by book publicist Sloane Crosley. In one essay, excerpted in Radar's April issue, Sloane describes the peculiar detritus of 10 years of dating life—a box of plastic My Little Ponies, gifted by suitors who took her request for "a pony" seriously. In another, Crosley bemoans the fact that, given her "muted" Westchester upbringing, her name is the most unusual thing about her, and muses about the way that it's affected her life—turns out you get a lot of Ferris Bueller's Day Off jokes.

Sloane also writes about how people are surprised to discover she's Jewish, her failure ever to have had a one-night stand, her propensity for losing her keys, and her failure at volunteering in a butterfly exhibit. She's so gosh-darned normal! And it's exactly her everygirl quality that makes her stories appealing. Reading the book is like having an incredibly engaging conversation with a charming quirky girl. But there's a problem: The blurbs are really good.

"Sloane Crosley is a 21st-century Dorothy Parker," Jonathan Ames raves on the back cover, while on the front, Jonathan Lethem calls her "a mordant and mercurial wit from the realm of Sedaris and Vowell." This is the kind of praise that makes backlashes begin months before publication, especially when the author in question knows everyone in publishing and is young, attractive, and famously nice. A New York Observer profile published in November detailed her likable traits, and even called her "the most popular publicist in town," prompting (sigh) a Gawker commenter to snipe, "She sounds unbearable. People really like her?" Sloane's not worried, though—she thinks the book will find an audience outside the backbitey world she inhabits. Recently, Radar met with Sloane to talk about being New York's most popular publicist, and why, after you've survived having someone shit on your bathroom floor (more on that later), everything else is just gravy.

The story goes that the seed of your book was planted when an e-mail you'd sent to friends about locking yourself out of two apartments in one day caught an editor's eye and ended up as a column in the Voice, which makes it sound like you became a writer sort of accidentally and serendipitously. But some of the essays in your book about your teenage years and your first years in New York are full of such vivid detail that it seems like you must have been planning this book for a long time—or at least keeping a diary. Were you?
I have gone through periods when I kept a diary—or its grown-up incarnation, "the journal"—but usually because I was a hyperconscious child and felt that girls my age were obliged to keep a diary. I tried it in college and while traveling as well, but it never stuck. Even as a kid, I have to say I wasn't that into it and would fill up the prelined pages with drivel just so I could say I did it. Not unlike my criminal negligence of my "invisible friend" that I mention in the book. So, no, I didn't have a log to consult for these essays. I think I'm just hypernostalgic in general and have a narrow kind of memory for detail. In fact, when I look back on the brief periods in which I did keep a journal, what I remember is writing in the journal—where I was sitting, the ink, my terrible penmanship—more than I remember the experience itself. I blame the journal-keeping for this strange memory removal. So, if I had planned on writing this particular book for the past decade, it would have turned out very differently, if at all.

In that sense, I'd be a disaster at blogging. I need a little time to reflect, to experience, and then see where a story fits in my life, and usually the details and images come rushing back in reverse.

As a book publicist, you're used to herding people through this process and, probably, trying to help them manage their images a bit. But now you're being interviewed and profiled, and already there's been a bit of a backlash, much of which boils down to, "She seems too genuine to be a publicist and too sociable to be a writer!" How are you dealing with criticism? Do you feel like you're on the defensive?

Did I feel all the blood rush out of my head the day the Observer piece anointed me "most popular"? Yes. I also thought, well, on the off chance that was ever true, it ain't anymore. Thanks for nothing, guys. In the end, I am of course quite happy with and flattered by that kind of press, but I was pretty concerned about the reaction of my coworkers and other book publicists. I know first-hand how incredibly talented and deserving they are—and how long many of them have been doing this. The good news is that these are the same people who truly know that neither reporters nor subjects create the headlines. Everyone's been extremely supportive, which was a huge relief.

As for the "too genuine to be a publicist and too sociable to be a writer" part, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Being genuine seems requisite for the job. And assuming writers are antisocial just plays into some cliché that if you're a writer you should either be J.D. Salinger or J.D. Salinger in a dress. I am happy to say I know more than a few hilariously social, kind, and fully functional writers. Maybe the difference is that most of their friends aren't media people. Their personalities at parties are not topics for discussion simply because they're not as visible to the people with notepads. This doesn't mean that J.M. Coetzee doesn't do a mean limbo.

Speaking of "a mean limbo," your book is full of quirky little turns of phrase like that one—your story about telling boys who ask what you'd like that you'd like a pony springs to mind. Where do you think your sense of humor comes from? Any people or writers who helped shape your voice?
Thank you. My dad's a pretty funny guy. When it comes to published funny people, I also love reading David Rakoff, Dorothy Parker, Ian Frazier, and also Maeve Brennan. In general, I think my own sense of humor just comes from a leap of faith that I'm not alone. Not so much in the Scientologist alien savior sense, but in the idea that most people secretly covet, adore, are appalled by, and are disappointed in the same things, small and large. This is not a revolutionary source for humor, of course. It's the whole "we laugh because it's true" principle. Though, right this second, my sense of humor is coming from a movie I saw the other night called Attack of the Crab Monsters. I was cleaning my apartment and it was on in the background and one soldier turns to the other and says, slowly, ominously, "Once they were men. Now they are land crabs." I think that's just about the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life.

Well, I know I got a lot of those "we laugh because it's true" laughs out of your story "The Ursula Cookie," about being driven to fake a relative's death by your crazy first boss in publishing. It made me think of your book as a sort of a useful counterpoint to chick lit—like, "this is how it really is to be a single twentysomething girl in Manhattan; it's not all madcap hijinx and Cosmos and love triangles" (though sometimes it is those things; rarely Cosmos). But you also must have been aware that you were treading into some heavily trafficked territory when writing about being a bad bridesmaid, etc. Are you wary at all of being lumped in with books on the pink shelf?
It's such a massive lump at this point. I might have been more worried five or 10 years ago when the concept was first being identified, coined, and marketed. But now it seems like if you just pick up a pen and have breasts (not that anyone I know is actually picking up pens with their breasts, in case that's confusing), then people are predisposed to think what you produce as chick lit. And if it's in the first person? Forget it. Since the stereotype has grown so widespread it's almost pointless to be fearful of it. It's out there, it sells a lot of perfectly good books to the people that want them, and there's no getting around it. I know mine's not the same, so hopefully it'll be okay. For one thing, it's the details of what an individual life is really like that can save a book from the Cosmo trap, especially in the essay format. Plus, it's not like I have a giant martini glass on my cover with, you know, a miniature sparkling stiletto in lieu of an olive.

It's funny, at Vintage we reissued Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? with a new cover, a decade after it was first published, and some tiny paper reviewed it as if it had just come out. It was fascinating because they condemned it as trafficking the same territory as the "pink shelf" books. And I thought, this is Lorrie Moore, damn it. How far have we let this thing get that there are to be no more plotlines about female friendships or the opposite sex or coming of age or self-reflection at all? I think the only way to avoid the label of which you speak would be to write a novel in which a woman sits in a room painted black, speaks to no one for 400 pages, and keeps a gun in one hand and a scotch-stained copy of The Executioner's Song in the other. Even then, she'd probably have to use a pseudonym.

Well, clearly you're not about to write My Only Friends Are This Gun and This Scotch-Stained Copy of the Executioner's Song next, so what are you going to write next? Working on anything?

Wait, I love that title. But to answer your question, I wrote a novel a couple years ago (a very dark comedy) that I have mixed feelings about. So, into the proverbial drawer it goes and I've started something else I'm very excited about.

For a while, I had this feeling that if people didn't want to discuss their work, then what they were working on must not be that great—if it could be so easily disturbed by summarizing the plot in a few lines. But for the first time, I find myself very protective over the new book. Can we play two truths and a lie? Awesome: It's a semihistorical novel, it involves many fat people, one quarter of it is in a foreign language.

Okay, one last question! Did you ever find out who pooped on your bathroom floor?
Ah, I'm afraid that information is confidential. It's between me and the Anti-Defecation League.