Zita recently introduced me to the quirky essays of Sloane Crosley (which is great because I was starting to get a little stuck in the 639 page task that is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and needed a quick pick-me-up read). Sloane is a young woman living in NYC who has a tendency to stumble upon awkward situations–whether they be Portuguese circus clowns, a guy named Daryl who smuggles expensive carpets, throw pillows, and whatever else you might want from a fine furniture store, or curious children inquiring about what happens to butterflies after they die.
As a girl who wanders into some awkward situations herself and never seems capable of tempering the awkwardness, I can relate to Sloane. In fact, I’d love to be friends with her and exchange stories. I’m sure it would be a fun time. Who knows, maybe we’d become B.F.F.s.
Below is an excerpt from Sloane’s essay “Bastard Out of Westchester.” After finishing this essay, I actually called my boyfriend and read this excerpt aloud to him over the phone. “Joseph, this is me,” I chirped. “I have this same idea! Don’t you think I should be best friends with this girl?” I’m sure he was rolling his eyes at me on the other line while placating my excitement with an “Mmhmm, honey. That’s funny.”
From I Was Told There’d Be Cake (pg. 67-68):
If I ever have kids, this is what I’m going to do with them: I am going to give birth to them on foreign soil–preferably the soil of someplace like Oostende or Antwerp–destinations that have the allure of being obscure, freezing, and impossibly cultured. These are places in which people are casually trilingual and everyone knows how to make good coffee and gourmet dinners at home without having to shop for specific ingredients. Everyone has hip European sneakers that effortlessly look like the exact pair you’ve been searching for your whole life. Everything is sweetened with honey and even the generic-brand Q-tips are aesthetically packaged. People die from old age or crimes of passion or because they fall off glaciers. All the women are either thin, thin and happy, fat and happy, or thin and miserable in a glamorous way. Somehow none of their Italian heels get caught in the fifteenth-century cobblestone. Ever. This is where I want to raise my children–until the age of, say, ten, when I’ll cruelly rip them out of the stream where they’re fly-fishing with their other lederhosened friends and move them to someplace like Lansdale, Pennsylvania. There, they can be not only the cool new kid, but also the Belgian kid. And none of that Toblerone-eating, Tintin-reading, tulip-growing crap. I want them to be obscurely, freezingly, impossibly Belgian. I want them to be fluent in Flemish and to pronounce “Antwerpen” with a hint of “vh” embedded in the “w.”
Oh, if only my parents had done this for me.
For more about Sloane Crosley, check out Nell’s blog here. -Kaycie
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