The New Yorker - Harper's BAZAAR

Sloane Crosley’s new novel, Cult Classic, confronts the universal fear of running into your ex. Alexandra English gets a moment with the humour essayist and keen observer of Manhattan life

If the thought of running into one ex-partner isn’t bad enough, imagine running into a different one almost every time you step out of the house. You’d surely think mysterious and unkind forces were at play.

That’s exactly the premise of Sloane Crosley’s second novel, Cult Classic. Lola is a thirtysomething former magazine writer living in New York, freshly engaged to a perfectly nice glassblower named Max, who she affectionally calls Boots. But she’s languishing: her new job isn’t as exciting as magazines were in their golden era, and her stable relationship is starting to go stale. She’s a billboard for nostalgia — her best friends are her former colleagues, and she seems to keep running into her ex-boyfriends within the same five-block radius of her apartment. While she believed her apprehension about marrying Boots was a private one she shared only with the engagement ring she doesn’t really like, it’s clear that someone — or something — is invested in shaking up her love life.

It’s not a spoiler to say this is not coincidental. Her best friend brings her to a former synagogue that has become the centre for a “not a cult” cult, run by their former magazine editor turned entrepreneur. Using a somewhat sinister combination of traditional and contemporary “not mind control” mind control techniques, such as manifesting and targeted ads, the organisation is utilising the power of soft suggestion to place all of Lola’s exes in her way in a distorted though well-intentioned attempt to bring her closure. Their (group)thinking is that in order for her to stop considering her previous relationships as alternate realities, she must confront them and let them go. If it works, the organisation will start selling variations of these morally dubious experiments as packages for people looking to buy themselves closure.

Crosley developed somewhat of a cult following herself in literary nonfiction circles after her 2008 essay collection, I Was Told There’d be Cake — a bright and funny retelling of her early New York years when she “aimed for the stars and hit the ceiling” — gained her fans including David Sedaris and Nick Hornby. In her follow-up in 2010, How Did You Get This Number?, she took her observational wit to Paris, Portugal, Alaska and back to her beloved New York. Her debut novel, 2015’s The Clasp, is about a group of late-twentysomethings reuniting for an extravagant wedding, during which a treasure hunt and comedy ensues. She returned to essays in 2018 with Look Alive Out There, a collection that saw her add “a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really” to her signature observational humour.

As genres go, romantic comedies have been declared to be back. Publishers and critics alike praise the romance revival for celebrating its messy, independent female protagonists, who are no longer required to be virginal and helpless teens until a — notably older — shirtless man arrives to save them. These days, the women are likely to be in their thirties, career-focused and self-possessed. They are also now more likely to be single parents, have chronic pain, or not be into men at all. All of this to say that perhaps it’s not romance that’s back, but funny stories about women’s lives where romance is just the cherry on top. While Crosley’s Cult Classic is lauded by her peers as a romantic comedy, she is adamant it is a comedy with romance in it; the misinterpretation hinging on a technicality: “the difference between being Assistant Manager and Assistant to the Manager”, she explains.

Cult Classic is funny, and it does have romance in it. Crosley ticks off the big heartbreaks and the uncertainty that comes with deciding whether someone is The One. But she also considers those almost-relationships that consumed you for three months and then fizzled into nothing. Are you allowed to be sad about breaking up after a few weeks? Is that even considered a breakup? Is it weird to wonder whether they ever think of you? Crosley gives those “situationships” space to be considered and mourned.

Ahead of the release of Cult Classic, Crosley speaks to Harper’s BAZAAR about being the tofu in your relationship, writing from experience and her creative process.

Harper’s BAZAAR: I’m hesitant to ask you about how much of the novel has come from your experience, because women authors seem to get asked more than male authors do. You’ve said in other conversations that the story about exes came out as a novel because it was something you felt you had to avoid as a female firstperson essayist. So, in saying that: what do you think of women being asked if their work comes from their personal lives, and did this come from yours?

Sloane Crosley: Of course, all writers, even science fiction writers — perhaps especially science fiction writers — tell stories rooted in their own experience. So, to admit that a novel about dating and human relationships is informed by my life on this planet is the least revelatory thing I could say. Having said that, sure, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn [in which she writes about her husband’s infidelity while she was seven months pregnant, thinly veiled as fiction] was not created out of thin air. But the truth is, the moment you give a character a name and a purpose for the plot of a fictional piece of writing, any real-life counterparts fade. They are the cue-ball break. Also, this is a rare instance in which I don’t think it’s women in particular who get asked about such things. And even if the author screams back, “Novel, novel!” I think, if we are honest, there’s a lovely compliment embedded in the confusion: the assumption that we couldn’t have just made it up, could we have?

HB: Romcoms have been declared to be “back” in popular culture, with new tropes, more diversity and a focus on women’s career ambitions. Cult Classic has been labelled a romcom, but it’s not clear who Lola will end up with, which is unusual for the genre. What made you want to write a modern romance now? Publishers have suggested the increase in romcom literature is a side-effect of the pandemic — everyone’s reconsidering their choices and need escapism — but you wrote this before COVID hit New York.

SC: I did write it before COVID hit New York and really under-thewire. I handed in the first draft of the manuscript in early March of 2020. I don’t really think it’s a romantic comedy so much as a comedy with romance in it. I suppose it’s the difference between being the Assistant Manager and the Assistant to the Manager. I don’t know if this undermines or bolsters the question, but yeah, women have had careers, ambitions and messy lives since before Little Women. So on the one hand, the idea that it’s a publishing trend is ludicrous. On the other, I think it’s important to pay attention to the idea of sentience and free will and complexity among women as a “trend”. It means we’re really not out of the woods yet if this is what people are saying.

HB: Lola is so relatable in that when she’s confronted with her exes, she realises how much she changed herself to suit each one. Anecdotally, that seems common among women. Is that something you’ve observed, or it was just a quirk of the character?

SC: Yes, it’s certainly something I’ve observed! People turn into tofu and just accept whatever flavour they’re given. But part of the beauty of getting older is you don’t do that anymore. I suppose the reverse is to become intractable, completely set in your ways, so there’s no room for a new person to get to know you. But the former is worse, in my opinion. Most of the people Lola runs into are from her twenties, some early thirties, even a smattering of teen romance. So, she is reflecting on her former self. Personally, I like to think I was never like that, that I was a bit more formed and confident early on in my life, but it’s not for me to say.

HB: How is the process of writing fiction and nonfiction different for you, do they scratch different itches?

SC: On a sentence level, they’re very similar. There are only so many ways to describe turning a doorknob or drinking whiskey or looking at the bark on a tree. If I have a decent, beautiful or funny way of capturing a moment or an image, that’s going to be interchangeable between the formats. But in terms of intent and topic, the writing and reason itself, they could not be more different. To bounce off the world and work with the cold-hard facts of it, of what I did or did not experience, is a totally different animal than being inspired by the world and making something new out of it. They are equal challenges, but they produce different kinds of art.

QUICK-FIRE CREATIVE QUESTIONNAIRE

What one element is necessary for your creative process?

Time. It’s so important to be able to walk away from your work for as long as possible and come back to it with a more critical eye.

How do you procrastinate?

I read, I walk, I check Instagram and mainline TV like everyone else. But I will often take micro-breaks to, I don’t know, go pet the cat.

Which place or mood is most conducive for ideas?

My apartment or the woods.

Where is the best place to work?

I like to work at kitchen and dining room tables over desks.

What are you reading?

Bonsai, by Alejandro Zambra.

Do you have a document with tens of thousands of words you’ve cut during edits that you can’t let go of?

No, not for Cult Classic, I have notes here and there, but I was more economical with this novel than I have been in the past.

What do you love most about New York?

The people. Nicest, realest people on earth.

What are the best and worst pieces of advice you’ve ever received?

The best is probably to “finish things”, just get a draft done. The worst, and this is not writing advice, is to put conditioner on my roots.

This article originally appeared in the August 2022 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.