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The Sloane Ranger(continued)
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? 
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? READ MORE • Big Wiig: Kristen Wiig, this season's Saturday Night Live standout, lets her hair down • The Ladies' Man: Radar catches up with Dr. Travis Stork, the former Bachelor: Paris beefcake turned love doctor, and learns the perils of being "That Girl" 
Smart to have one of this town's nastiest writers interview one of it's nicest, but only if the real question promised in the intro ("problem is the blurbs are really good") would've had the temerity to be asked: so, does sloane think she deserves such high falutin literary comparisons so early in the game? Who cares about the backlash about her being the most popular publicist in town, isn't the real one about her "mordant and mercurial wit" and whether you can really have one if you're collecting ponies a la Miranda July and then writing like Anna fucking Quindlen?! what, was this penance for Emily Gould? Maybe she could go blog about her real feelings on the matter, you know, privately somewhere... also, those ponies and their horrible backlighting made for some garishly ugly pages in radar's last issue. I'm just sayin'! Posted by: yoko on March 4, 2008 9:25 AM Sloane Crosley is very beautiful. However I understand how she feels of being popular. Now these days popular stars can't go anywhere without having to worry about being kidnapped or paparazzi all over you. Paris Hilton also started this new shopping cart software business, because she mentioned she is tired of "being popular." She wants to start a online business so she won't have to leave her home as often. Posted by: ShoppingCartSoftware on March 4, 2008 5:00 PM Yoko, are you a lesbian vampire? Sloane is deserving of all the "high falutin" accolades that she gets. Hell, I'd buy her a cake. Posted by: Buckeyesontheprize on March 6, 2008 12:35 PM yes, i am! look, i hope she deserves the blurbs, yoko gives praise when due, but was just blind to the power of the pony story. The point is that the Gould didn't ask the question that was enticing in the intro, that's all. In fact, it's lame to do a q and a with someone, not ask about something, and then drop that something in the intro. Bye. Posted by: yoko on March 6, 2008 7:08 PM Advertisement Post a commentYour comment will not be visible for about a minute. If you don't see your comment when the page reloads, do not post it again. Reload the page in a minute, and you'll see it. < BACK TO Features |
    
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