I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Wittier than a convention of Woody Allen impersonators, and considerably more attractive, Sloane (I like to think of us on first-name terms) is a sassy, snappy New York girl with a good line in both withering condescension and touching uncertainty. She’s the sort of friend you’d long to have in the ‘city that never sleeps’, but you’d also be just a little bit scared that you might end up in one of her essays – as a jerk.

This collection brings together Sloane’s musings on the boss from hell (Sloane makes a giant cookie portrait of her face in an act of unmeditated job suicide), what it means to be a (not very serious) Jew at Christian summer camp, and the kindness of strangers in a supposedly dangerous city. She ponders the origin of her unusual first name, tells us about the time she locked herself out of her flat twice in one day (her doormat ironically stated ‘Déjà Vu Déjà Vu frontwards and backwards’) and admits her almost lifelong quest for a one-night stand.

There’s much more, but my favourite essay is called ‘You on a Stick’, in which our intrepid and beautiful narrator gets caught up in the horror of a modern wedding. Telephoned out of the blue by Francine, a former schoolfriend who she hasn’t heard from for the best part of a decade, Sloane finds herself agreeing to be ‘in’ Francine’s wedding. ‘I agreed because, barring exorbitant plane fare or typhus, you can’t not agree.’

Thus follows an underworld of pain for Sloane, as envelope stuffing leads unexpectedly to an invitation to be part of the wedding party. An increasingly hysterical Francine suggests that her ‘ladies’ lose weight before the wedding, then tells them to go pick out their own baby pink plaid silk for their dresses. And so it goes on, the ‘bridetatorship’ working herself up into an ever-more unstable entity, until Sloane’s patience is at breaking point. Hilarious. And true.

The good news (for me) is that Sloane admits she does want to get married: ‘It’s a nice idea. Though I think husbands are like tattoos – you should wait until you come across something you want on your body for the rest of your life instead of just wandering into a tattoo parlor on some idle Sunday and saying, “I feel like I should have one of these suckers by now. I’ll take a thorny rose and a ‘MOM’ anchor, please. No, not that one – the big one.” ’

Sloane, you know where I am. I can even spell your name correctly.