[Crosley] 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.
—The New York Times
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)
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
It's a brave writer who risks reading his or her audiobook. But the few who do it well, such as David Sedaris and Dave Barry, make the chance worth taking. Now Sloane Crosley joins that elite club with a funny, poignant collection of essays about her life as a child, a world traveler, and a single working woman trying to make it in Manhattan. Her slightly nasal voice makes her words seem real. She sounds like the person who has lived the words as she talks chattily about being lost in Lisbon and Paris, feeling out of her element in Alaska, and handling a clothes-stealing, near-psychotic roommate in New York. Who can’t use advice like that? M.S. 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
It's a brave writer who risks reading his or her audiobook. But the few who do it well, such as David Sedaris and Dave Barry, make the chance worth taking. Now Sloane Crosley joins that elite club with a funny, poignant collection of essays about her life as a child, a world traveler, and a single working woman trying to make it in Manhattan. Her slightly nasal voice makes her words seem real. She sounds like the person who has lived the words as she talks chattily about being lost in Lisbon and Paris, feeling out of her element in Alaska, and handling a clothes-stealing, near-psychotic roommate in New York. Who can’t use advice like that? M.S. 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
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 author-whose day job as a book publicist is rarely mentioned-taking 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 France-or 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.
