Cake to celebrate making peace with an existential dilemma

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	• I Was Told There'd Be Cake Sloane Crosley Riverhead Trade, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 62 reviews view larger image
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Too good?

Perhaps the real Sloane Crosley is a transgendered junkie raised in foster homes by abusive religious fanatics. One never knows these days (and maybe not just these days, if you think of Daniel Defoe faking it). Anyway she writes in the persona of a young, healthy, good-looking heterosexual with Westchester parents, a New England College, and a Manhattan job. These are handicaps for the vendor of comic reminiscences, but Crosley overcomes them nobly, and was able to make me laugh out loud at several points. She makes the most of the childhood traumata of having an unusual name and being assigned the second best bedroom. Would Augusten Burroughs have managed as well with such scant material? He had it made.
I was about to conclude with commiserating her for the fact that humor is a tough competitive market, and that even the most brilliant satire ends up on the reminder tables if it ever makes print, but I see that she's in the Amazon top one hundred bestseller list. No theodicy is needed.

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Witty and Unpretentious

I immediately fell in love with Sloane. I felt the book was a conversation that we were having-- and a hilarious one at that. I believe that she writes the way she speaks, completely disarming and so pleasant. I fell in love with her.

A quick read, very funny. I was sorry it had to end.

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Cake to celebrate making peace with an existential dilemma

It seems that there is no denying the existential reality that we are all ultimately alone, and try as hard and we might, it's impossible to get another to really get us. Perhaps there are two basic choices to approaching this dilemma. We could drive ourselves crazy in trying to be known and fully understood by the world (and lose ourselves in the process). Or, we can just do the best we can in being upfront about our idiosyncrasies, and along the way, understand ourselves more/make others laugh/get a book deal out of it. Sloane's essays are not only funny, entertaining, refreshingly-off-the-beaten-path, and uncannily hard to forget, but they also seem to model a solution to the existential dilemma of never being fully known: unapologetically embracing our idiosyncrasies.

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Fantastic Reading for a Light Dinner Alone

Bravo to Sloane Crosley, who has achieved an incredibly high sales ranking for her debut book. This collection of humorous and sometimes-surprisingly-insightful essays has the sort of edge that cuts profoundly with anyone who has a funny bone, remembers their 20s, or simply refuses to grow older than twenty four in their minds. It's best read alone where you can laugh out loud as long and hard as you want; I recommend over a light dinner alone, when you can mindlessly chew in one world while cavhorting through another with a fantastic, fresh new tour guide.

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A writer worth watching

I was drawn to this book because the pull quote on the cover said it was in the tradition of Sederis and Vowell. While I am glad I read it, it is not a must read. Crosley is talented but can be predictable and cliché. She lacks self-awareness. At the same time, she's terribly funny (she even pulls off mean funny), gutsy and admirably self-confident. She's best when she is honest and generous. I look forward to reading more of her work and watching her grow as a writer. As for this book, it would have benefitted from a tougher editor.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, page 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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