Dorothy Parker on a stick
Sloane Crosley’s debut, I Was Told There’d be Cake, is a charming collection of essays about surviving quarter-life.
“You on a Stick” nails the indecencies of the twentysomething condition. It’s an essay about being roped into becoming Maid of Honor (“that’s my slave name,” Crosley quips) for a childhood friend—a send-up of marriage and the just-add-water relationships we try to maintain if only for the sake of nostalgia.
Crosley’s writing is clever and pithy, but some readers might find it too tame. It sometimes reads like an episode of Three’s Company.
Her subjects range from a mortifying fetish for plastic ponies to a guest leaving a pooplet on her bathroom floor. Of these, “Bring-Your-Machete-To-Work Day” comes closest to being satire with teeth. Here, Crosley reveals the source of her adolescent addiction to the computer game Oregon Trail and its Sims-like pervertability. Loading her wagon with enemies like her algebra teacher, Crosley torments them with bad buffalo meat:
Eventually a message would pop up…MRS. TRUST HAS DIED OF DYSENTERY. It filled me with glee.