I read one of the most genuinely hysterical books recently, a collection of short essays by Sloane Crosley, (freelancer for Black Book Magazine, The Village Voice and Playboy) cleverly entitled I Was Told There’d Be Cake. It was only after finishing the book did I discover that her social tendencies and side splitting anecdotes are very reminiscent of myself, and maybe that’s why I really appreciate the writing. Below is a short excerpt from the essay “Bastard out of Westchester,” which I hope demonstrates that the book is definitely worth the read.
“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.”
(Book extract courtesy of http://www.bookbrowse.com)
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