A review by ladyeremite
How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley

3.0

Despite apparently dividing the crowd of reviewers on this site, Crosley's book left me deeply ambivalent. On one hand, I found it easy and quick to read, generally funny (if not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny all the time, and verging towards precious at many others) and very relatable. On the other hand, its relatability was, for me, its most ambivalent aspect. Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned; as someone around the author's age, I feel that if one is going to write two books of one's own memoirs by the time one is 33, one really should have done or thought something extraordinary. With the exception of her early learning disability, Crosley seems to have stuck remarkably close to the Prescribed Narrative of the bright twentysomething upper middle-class liberal arts schools graduate in the humanities. As such, her reflections on places (most notably life in New York and Paris) exude a kind of immaturity-masquerading as sophistication, unable to convey any kind of freshness to warn stereotypes. Frankly, I can get the same kind of humor, handled with almost as much skill, from many of my friends (also drawn disproportionately from the ranks of bright twentysomething upper middle-class liberal arts school graduates in the humanities) and from a variety of online blog written by and targeting such an audience. Had these essays come from those sources, I would have found them extremely congenial. Perhaps part of me still holds to the idea that The Printed Word should be somehow different, sacrosanct, preserved for people who genuinely have something to say that will last through time. Perhaps I need to adapt to the idea that the relatively typical life trajectory of the upper-middle-class twentysomething with literary ambitions is a subject of intense and timeless interest when cleverly explored. But, seriously, the line between navel-gazing and genuine reflection seems to have become very blurry these past few decades.

On the plus side, this collection did spark an intense desire to visit Alaska!