Elizabeth Vance ’09
Web Editor-in-Chief

There is no cake in “I Was Told There’d be Cake,” by Sloane Crosley. The closest the book ever comes to cake is a chocolate torte that makes a brief appearance in a disastrous dinner party hosted by the author.

Despite this false advertising and the fact that it is not nearly as profound as Crosley evidently thinks it is, there is something so endearingly familiar about Crosley and her essays that the book triumphs in its own quiet way.

The book itself consists of a series of personal essays taken from the author’s experiences growing up in Westchester and working in the city as a young adult.

These essays feel more like long winded anecdotes than essays, since they rarely, if ever, conclude to make a point, but somehow, it doesn’t matter. They’re interesting stories, a collection of the random, funny, and briefly significant.

Most are based on Crosley’s escapades as a young twenty-something uneasily entering the life of an adult in the City.

Essays like “Ursula Cookie” and “The Good People Of This Dimension” portray Crosley navigating the hazards of a first post-college job, or finding kindness in the notoriously rude citizens of New York City.

Crosely is at her best when she is recalling the bitter disappointment she felt when she did not get the lead in her summer camp play, or the slight letdown she felt about moving into her first apartment alone.

These infrequent moments of deeper emotion allows a glimpse at power Crosley may eventually achieve as a writer, and make her real enough to excuse the flaws in her first book.

These flaws are there, and largely stem from Crosley’s backfiring attempts at humor. Crosley is funniest when she is firing off a snarky one liner in the direction of a pretentious friend or outdated social custom, but when she tries to construct an entire essay around implausible circumstances, as occurs in her opening essay, “The Pony Problem,” she falls flat.

The essay centers around the idea that Crosley, by telling the various men she dates how much she likes ponies, has ended up with dozens of small plastic ponies, given to her as presents. These ponies weigh on Crosley’s mind, apparently embodying everything she does wrong in her interactions with people, until she eventually abandons them on the Subway in a large garbage bag.

The best part, she doesn’t even really like ponies.

This kind of fantastical setup takes away from the power Crosley is able to achieve with much more honest stories, as she does in “Ursula Cookie,” which recounts the monotonous frustration of her first adult job in a publishing firm, which she is a miserable failure at.

The, for lack of a better word, realness Crosley achieves in an essay like this, where she is portraying a relatable situation with enough cynical, slightly self-deprecating humor to keep it from being depressing, is Crosley at her best, and mostly what leads me to give this book a largely positive review.

There is an art to being this open in a book without being depressing or off putting, and Crosley has mastered this.

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