Look Alive Out There

Starred review from November 20, 2017
Crosley (The Clasp), in her third collection of personal essays, continues her tradition of hilarious insight into the human condition, whether the human involved is scaling a 20,000-foot volcano in Ecuador or inadvertently flirting with a drugstore cashier. Several essays are concerned with the tensions that arise in urban life. In “Outside Voices,” the author tries to quiet a teenage neighbor’s nightly carousing without become crotchety and square in the process (“I bit the bullet and called 311, a placebo service for cranks on the brink”). “Wolf” involves a literal identity crisis as Crosley contends with a man holding her internet domain name hostage. “Cinema of the Confined” finds the author battling an extended bout of vertigo and drawing astute comparisons between travel writing and writing about illness. But as the dizziness is revealed to be a symptom of a rare and largely untreatable condition, the connection becomes fraught: “This was not some exotic destination that I would one day leave and report back on. This was my home now.” Crosley is exceedingly clever and has a witticism for all occasions, but it is her willingness to confront some of life’s darker corners with honesty and vulnerability that elevates this collection. Agent: Jay Mandel, William Morris Endeavor.

February 1, 2018
The latest collection from the Manhattan-based essayist suggests she can write engagingly about nearly anything.A decade after establishing herself with her bestselling debut, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, Crosley now finds herself addressing concerns and issues bordering on middle age, and she doesn't like it. An early example of how many thematic levels she builds into an essay comes with "Outside Voices," which seems, early on, to be about living in proximity to others, and then, more specifically, about "living on the most densely populated slip of land in America." A lesser essayist would mine this for all it's worth, but for Crosley, this is merely context for what comes to obsess her--the teenage boy next door and the family that entitles him to disturb the author's personal space with his noisy outdoor social life. What really bothers her about him is his youth, which shows her how old she has become. So while the essay addresses the challenges and annoyances of overcrowded Manhattan, to the voyeuristic delight of readers who haven't chosen to live there, it goes deeper into the universal ambivalence of realizing that you are no longer young and must seek out some type of second act as 40 approaches. As is typical in such collections, some essays are more ambitious and fully realized than others, but all work on multiple levels and all are sharply written, as Crosley continues to extend her impressive range. A writer writing about the writing life would not seem promising until she stumbles into a coven of pot-growing swingers who take the essay in an entirely different direction. An appearance on the canceled Gossip Girl might seem dated if it weren't so perceptive on various levels of celebrity and the stereotypes that public figures adopt. The author's closing essay on preserving her eggs is a marvel of ambivalence on ticking clocks and motherhood.A smart, droll essay collection that is all over the map but focused by Crosley's consistently sharp eye.

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Starred review from February 15, 2018
After publishing her first novel, the fun literary caper The Clasp (2015), Crosley returns to the form that put her name on best-seller lists for the essay collections I Was Told There'd Be Cake (2008) and How Did You Get This Number? (2010). A true humorist, Crosley brings to her writing just the kind of openness required to fly across the country for a heart-to-heart with her mom's former-porn-star cousin, or climb a South American volcano with her preparedness meter hovering somewhere around zero. A remote writing retreat is as creatively fruitful as she hoped it would be, and full of more stoner swingers than she ever expected. She takes an assignment to investigate chupacabra sightings in Vermont but meets a stupefying creature called Chartreuse instead. Laugh-out-loud funny seems too trite a phrase for a writer whose takes are so addictively original and unexpected, but it's also true: dear readers, you will laugh. Whether 2 or 20 pages in length, Crosley's essays are complete and stop-you-in-your-tracks clever; and whether readers have considered freezing their eggs or not, have or haven't paid top dollar to wrestle their personal websites back from an overseas opportunist, they'll settle right in.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2018

The author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, Crosley is an accomplished humorist who has earned her reputation with spot-on, incisive social critiques. In this way, the author's newest collection does not disappoint. In fact, this is Crosley at her best. These essays are funny but also complex and with depth. The author uses humor to not only entertain but also examine wealth and social inequality, sex and gender roles, fertility and death--topics that otherwise would not lend themselves easily to comedy. This collection is impressive in its subtlety. One essay that seemingly begins to describe a trip to Ecuador and an ill-formed plan to climb one of the world's tallest volcanoes gradually develops into a deeper meditation on human loneliness. In another, a retired porn star offers Crosley some wise love advice. And in another, a psychic coincidence somehow leads her into the lobby of a fertility clinic, confronting an egg-freezing dilemma. These essays, in other words, take readers to unexpected places. They surprise. VERDICT Crosley's growth and maturity as a writer shines in this collection, and it's fair to say: she is the millennial's Nora Ephron. [See Prepub Alert, 10/29/17.]--Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY

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