Review by New York Times Review
THE phrase "new female voice of her generation" has been flung around to describe 28-year-old Emily Gould, setting up ridiculously high expectations for her first book, a melancholy essay collection called "And the Heart Says Whatever." Every so often a young woman is presented that way. She writes an article or a book that speaks frankly about navigating a changing world with little or no guidance. She's a fluid writer - and a looker. Her photo is blown up on book jackets and magazine covers. Think of Elizabeth Wurtzel; farther back, Joyce Maynard. These women may not turn out to be generationally representative at all, but idiosyncratic, even oddball. Editors still hunt for the next one. (Photo not optional.) Gould's book is, in a way, a record of its own creation: the story of how Emily Gould, a frightened high school senior in suburban Maryland, rejected by all the colleges she applied to except not-fancy-enough Kenyon, came to be the media savvy New York author of a book like this. But she makes no claim to generational anything. The essays are concerned almost exclusively with events taking place in or around her own heart. That organ, as the book's unalluring title (taken from a Stevie Nicks song) suggests, has after many disappointments and losses come to be seen by its owner as resilient. Quite often, though, Gould just numbs herself in various ways (say, by smoking pot every day, a habit she doesn't reveal until Page 204). After nearly a decade of New York life she is sadder but, she insists, no wiser. "I can look back and recognize the things I've done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule breaking," she writes. But "I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. . . . I would do it all again." She seems to think this is a brave and honest stance, and maybe it is, but it's also unpromising. Is there nothing she would reconsider? At times she comes across, confusingly, as a character in a coming-of-age novel - but alas, no novelist arrives to explain her to herself. Not in suburbia anymore: Emily Gould, left, and Sloane Crosley write of living, loving and learning in the big city. Still, her voice is sweet and searching, often untangling complicated moods, like that adolescent combination of ennui and fierce sexual longing. On a frigid day after a demoralizing hookup, she recalls, "I felt the vacuum of the empty suburbs surrounding me like a black hole in which my body was suspended, as though I were the only warm alive thing left in the world." She writes perceptively and gracefully about riding her "free-floating ambition" after she escaped Kenyon and planted herself in New York, enduring the usual youthful work humiliations and social disorientation. As a release from the tedium of her tow-level publishing job, she starts a blog about her life. That helps her get hired at the gossip site Gawker. The new gig thrills her, especially the ease it allows her, finally, at parties, and the micro-celebrity her writing brings, with its mix of knowing jabs at powerful people and self-revelation. But churning out Gawker posts takes its toll. Her panic attacks worsen. She cheats on her live-in boyfriend, Joseph, then breaks up with him, then blogs about it. She quits Gawker and wafts through Brooklyn freelance life, getting tattooed, attaching to other guys, processing her beloved grandfather's death, brooding over Joseph. She is still anxious and depressed. Often she recognizes but somehow doesn't fully register the shallowness of what she settles for, not understanding that being comfortable at sophisticated parties, for example, is great but not the same as true inner satisfaction. She seems always in need of a hug. Yet she also has a survivalist's edge, maintaining her Gawker-friendly willingness to betray if necessary. She writes about Joseph again, against his wishes, in "a venue where lots of people who'd know him would see it." That nameless "venue" is The New York Times Magazine, which made a cover story out of Gould's tale of her emotional crash as a blogger, giving her work a new footing. Is omitting the publication's name a faux-nonchalant brag? Is it a stand in solidarity with her passed-over high school self, designed to show indifference to the kind of East Coast institutional prestige that had eluded her earlier? Or maybe she is trying to erase the whole Times Magazine experience, which ended in a barrage of nasty online comments and a final estrangement from Joseph. In the end, she morosely admits she is betraying him yet again "now, writing this." All of these essays are drifty, which becomes more and more of a liability. She leaves things on an especially unsettled note, still sorting through feelings about that doomed relationship, still groping to articulate lessons she seems certain are buried somewhere in the daily details of her New York life. SLOANE CROSLEY is also a young woman from suburbia with a publishing job in New York, but where Gould seems to want her story to be shocking and modern, Crosley goes for charming and old-fashioned. She mostly succeeds in "How Did You Get This Number," her second collection of essays about making it, zanily, in the big city. Crosley is like a tap-dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike, occasionally trite, but capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation that motivate the performance. Her subjects tend toward New York chestnuts: near-heroic apartment searches, bad smells in taxis, New Yorker-out-of-water trips to exotic places. But Crosley has an original spark. As a child she was told she had "a learning disability that means I have zero spatial relations skills." She cannot read a map or tell time on an analog clock and is often lost. Her humor is one way to mask distress: "Whatever natural inability I had to orient myself I had doused with a self-made need to cover it up." In one darkly funny essay she travels alone to Lisbon in winter, speaking no Portuguese, wandering the empty city miserably, until she meets a friendly group of clowns-in-training and commences a dialogue by drawing stick figures; one clown conveys her affair with a superior clown. In another, she elegantly fillets a friend's family after they offer to buy an apartment for her and the friend to live in, she paying them rent. They keep, raising her contribution, unable to stomach sharing their bounty, until she backs out. Crosley leaves no hard feelings, though. Askew as her perception of the surface of life is, she tends to be right about the things that matter. In her best essay, "Off the Back of a Truck," she artfully blends a story of falling in love with another about furnishing her apartment with the help of a high-end furniture thief. The boyfriend turns out to be not what he seems, and guilt festers over her decorating secret. It's the shady furniture guy who delivers the kind of wisdom that comes hard to yearning young women who want so badly things they can't possibly have earned yet. Of the lost boyfriend he says simply, "It wasn't as real as you thought it was." Maria Russo is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 6, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her first collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008), Crosley revealed herself as the kind of writer with whom readers could be friends. You could exchange travel stories or compare descriptions of the odor of a NYC taxicab, and you could probably make her laugh, too. In Crosley's new book, she maintains her humor but inflects it with a sense of melancholy. In the manner of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, Crosley tells us about European vacation disasters, the inexhaustible nuances of life in New York, and playing the role of bridesmaid . . . in Alaska. Here even more personal and reflective than in her prior writing, Crosley saves the best for last with the beautifully layered Off the Back of a Truck, which also contains the inspiration for the book's title. In this story about learning the range of what we can and can't afford, she explains that some things are worth foregoing morality to get (hint: they are rugs and ottomans, not boyfriends). Her ability to be at once so familiar and still surprise us is really showcased here. Smart, clever, and frank, Crosley's stories are as intimate, and embarrassingly eccentric, as the thoughts we keep to ourselves.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nine thoughtful, unfussy essays by the author of the collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake navigate around illusions of youth in the hope that by young adulthood they'll "all add up to happiness." The account of Crosley's footloose adventure to Lisbon on the eve of her 30th birthday starts things off in rollicking fashion in "Show Me on the Doll": without proficient language skills, getting hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of Bairro Alto, and panicking in front of the myriad QVC channels offered by her hotel, Crosley recognizes that Lisbon "was a place with a painfully disproportionate self-reflection-to-experience ratio." There is the requisite essay about moving to New York and replacing her anorexic-kleptomaniac roommate with a more acceptable living arrangement: in Crosley's case, delineated in "Take a Stab at It," she is interviewed by the creepily disembodied current occupier of a famous former brothel on the Bowery, McGurk's Suicide Hall. As well, Crosley delivers witty, syncopated takes on visiting Alaska and Paris, and finding much consolation from a two-timing heartbreak in New York by buying stolen items from her "upholstery guy," Daryl, who found them fallen "Off the Back of a Truck," as the delightful last selection is titled. These essays are fresh, funny, and eager to be loved. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Sometimes you read a book that rings so true to your own life that you can hardly put it down. This is the case with Crosley's second collection, after her best-selling I Was Told There'd Be Cake. With wit, humor, and a sophistication that more experienced authors would envy, this compilation focuses on Crosley's late twenties. As Crosley writes about an impromptu trip to Lisbon that may (or may not) have been a freak-out response to turning 30 and explores the various trappings of being a grown-up-relationships, apartments of one's own, and well-upholstered furniture that just happened to fall off the back of a truck-readers will recognize their own life experiences, with Crosley's insights and excellent storytelling skills to guide them. VERDICT Reading like the diary entries of a thirtysomething, Crosley's essays are brutally honest about her flaws as well as the flaws of others and, as a result, paint a realistic and hilarious portrait of what it's like to be an adult in today's world. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/10.]-Deborah Hicks, Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A worthy successor to Crosley's well-received debut, I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008).Where her first collection focused on a young professional's life in Manhattan, this follow-up finds the authorwhose day job as a book publicist is rarely mentionedtaking her show on the road. She gets lost in Lisbon (actually, she gets lost pretty much everywhere), threatened by a bear in Alaska and all but deported from Franceor at least discouraged from ever again visiting Notre Dame. Most of the book is funny, some of it even laugh-out-loud, but her literary gifts go well beyond easy laughs. The humor flows naturally and subtly from characters and situations, as if these were real-life short stories. "An Abbreviated Catalog of Tongues," which initially seems to be a perfunctory pet essay, yet turns revelatory in a number of directions, addressing everything from sibling relationships to her parents' religion. "[M]y parents are not big believers in God," she writes. "Or, rather, they believe in him partially. Which is tricky. It's like being kind of pregnant or only mostly dead. You're either in or you're out." Perhaps the finest essay is the final one, "Off the Back of a Truck," a clever, challenging piece from which the book takes its title. Initially about wanting what you can't afford, it transforms into an exploration of receiving what you want that you can't afford, through means that you're only partially willing to admit are pretty shady. Ultimately, though, it becomes a meditation on a romance that forces Crosley to come to terms with a truth she'd suspected and the lie she was living. It's the least humorous of the collection, but the most unflinchingly true.Confirmation of the promise shown in the author's bestselling debut.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
