I Was Told There'd Be Cake | Sloane Crosley | Talks at Google

Hi everyone. Hi Santa Monica. Thanks for coming to today's third Authors at Google event, which is guaranteed to involve less foreign policy than Samantha Powers and produce more laughter than Jim Leakes. It's a great pleasure to have Sloane Crosley with us today to talk about her debut collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, in which she covers everything from the pain of being a bridesmaid for someone whom she's not really friends with to what she once called a phenomenal feat of idiocy that that involved locking herself out of two separate Manhattan apartments in a single day and using the services of the same locksmith both times. It really takes incredible skill. I mean, seriously, two apartments one day and that person who did it also happens to possess a fresh literary voice bursting with energy and humor that is sort of incredible. Sloane is an associate director of publicity at Vintage Books and her writing has previously appeared in the Village Voice, the Salon, the New York Times, and Maxim, where she wrote the COVID story for the worst selling issue in that magazine's history. She's the recipient of Several Ferris Bueller jokes, 3567 according to her count, and high praise from the likes of Jonathan Leatham, who called her another mordant and mercurial wit from the realm of Sedaris and Val, and claim that what makes her so funny is that she seems to be telling the truth helplessly. Having read work from all of those essays, I can attest to the claim. You now hold in your hands the funniest collection, the funniest book that I've read all year, and I think that if you read it, you'll come to the same conclusion. So please join me in welcoming Sloan Crosley to Google.

Thank you. That was so kind and embarrassing, but mostly very great. So I'm going to read a fairly short essay today. I've never read it aloud before, at least not at a place that doesn't serve alcohol, so I'll need some slack cutting. But it was the most sort of the closest I could come to a sort of Internet friendly essay, so I thought it would be appropriate. This essay is called Bring youg Machete to work day. In 1990, after our Apple Iie quit, our family purchased a Macintosh Classic. This was a good thing because the 2e was a constant source of confusion for me. For one thing, it took large flexible disks that were not even, despite all tactile evidence to the contrary, marked as floppy disks. The more current model discs, half their size and so hard you could eat off them, held the public title of Floppy. Also, neither of these options were in fact disc shaped. For another, the monitor would freeze or blink incessantly at you without telling you what was wrong, like a pet or a baby. I tried to fix it myself once, and the brightness knob shot out and hit me in the eye. And as if these crimes weren't enough to make us love the Macintosh Classic by comparison, our new computer came with three free games. One of them was Oregon Trail. I have no idea what the other two were a game of moderately tough choices and Rawhide. Oregon Trail wound its way subtly through the late 1980s in a very un 80s like fashion. Unlike Burger Time or Tetris, high speed programs structured around multiple levels, Oregon Trail slowly moved towards a singular goal. It also had a distinct masturbatory quality to it. Here was something that millions of preteens did, only you wouldn't find out until much later in life, something one could do over and over again with no diminishment of rewards. Apparently, many children learned how to play it at school, which strikes me as just plain illegal. For me, Oregon Trail was actually a private affair as well, something I engaged in after dinner when I was supposed to be doing homework. At the time, I was going through a somewhat awkward phase, both the somewhat and awkward being total understatements. I had a chin that would jut out when I smiled, as if it were trying to escape from my face. And who could blame it? My eyes were too big for my head, my hair too big for my whole body, and my whole body too flat to be noticed by anyone but me. Sadly, as it is for many of us, my awkward phase found me years before I qualified for a driver's license or even the alarm code to the house. Homebound and date free, I enjoyed an early teenagehood of drawing in journals and chatting with inanimate animals, prank calling boys and playing Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail, which provided me with the illusion that I was actually going somewhere. Once the game began, I became completely enthralled, pausing only to listen for the pattern of stair squeaks that would indicate a parent was descending. Oregon Trail was built on a completely unmodern premise. This also distinguished it from its contemporaries. There were no robots, no time machines, no spaceman possible in a world where people ate unrefrigerated animal guts and washed their socks in a bucket. Originally designed by a couple of college students to teach kids about the odors and tribulations of pioneer life, the game starts out in 19th century independence, Missouri and heads towards the West Coast. The screen itself displaying a khaki stretch of land in a mountain range in the distance. Never, ever alters. It moves from left to right as your tiny wagon heads west. But there are no pop ups requiring you to select a weapon. There are no shifts in perspective, and there are no interiors. It's like watching some brilliant independent film where there are no cuts and no scene changes, only a wagon and a little thing called destiny. It's also like watching a lost ant crawl across the kitchen counter, though you never see their faces. You can choose your Persona. A banker from Boston, likely a metaphor for Reagan. A farmer from Illinois, likely a metaphor for Carter. Or a carpenter from Ohio. Jesus. Each character comes complete with a skill set and a gun. Just one rifle. This was pre Uzi. For a future vegetarian, I sure shot a lot of venison. Unlike other games of the day, which had me leaping through traffic or called me gumshoe, Oregon Trail left lots of room for creativity. It seemed ripe for the misuse, like a precursor to the Sims. You are allowed to name your wagoneers and manipulate their destinies. It didn't take long for me to employ my powers for evil. I would load up the wagon with people I loathed, like my math teacher, and then I would intentionally lose the game, starving her or fording a river when I knew she was a weak. The program would attempt an intervention, informing me that I had had enough buffalo carcass for one day. One more lifeless caribou would make the wagon too heavy, endangering the lives of those inside. Really, now? How about three more? How about four? Nothing could stop this huntress of the diminutive. I can't say that word. I'm sorry. Planes. It was time to level the playing field between me and the woman who called my differential equations nonsensical in front of 15 other teenagers. Eventually, a message would pop up in the middle of the screen, framed in a neat box. Mrs. Ross has died of dysentery. This filled me with glee. I actually began playing the game in 1990, but it still reminds me of the 1980s. For the sake of Oregon Trail's influence, you have to ignore the date discrepancy. There's always a bit of cultural bleed between decades, and the segue from the 80s to the 90s is infamously fluid, especially if you were a child in the early 90s and the formative pop cultural markers of your life were four or five years down the road. It's the same reason Sunday morning movies can seem unquestionably from the 80s. But upon closer examination with the digital remote, they were made in like 1992. Think of slouch socks of Rock set of Jennifer Connelly and Elizabeth Shue with full faces, you're thinking of the 90s. Much like the Macintosh Classic itself, the 90s took a while to power up. I find that anything culturally significant that happened before 93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail was only a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all. Which brings us to now, here in the new millennium. There are actually five versions of the game available, including an Amazon Trail and an Africa trail. But none has provided as much milk to the pop culture teat as the original. Now the Wagoneers have realistic movements and facial features. Their adventures have become complicated, but at what cost? Would I be able to go on unceremonious killing sprees now as I did then? Perhaps now that you can click a button and see the inside of a wagon. Pioneer children napping through a shaky afternoon, dreaming under the dangling hides of eight rabbits and a moose. I know I will continue to wonder. I am too fond of my memories of Oregon Trail and not in the market to have them replaced. Alas, I no longer own a machine that plays video games, so my curiosity cannot be satisfied without a significant financial commitment. But apparently the game has changed for the better. It wasn't long before the original Oregon Trail was criticized for its complete lack of Native Americans, African Americans or three dimensional Americans of any kind. The hunting came under a certain degree of scrutiny as well, because apparently guns connote violence. Then there was the game's blatant favoring of rich white males. The banker is by far your best choice for your pixelated proxy. He's in good health. He comes with spare funds, which can be used to buy food in times of famine or the munchies. But despite this orgy of damning evidence, I still think of Oregon Trail as a great leveler. If, for example, you were a 12 year old girl from Westchester county with frizzy hair, a bite plate, no control over your own life, suddenly you could drown whomever you pleased. Say you have shot four bison, 11 rabbits and Bambi's mom. Say your wagon weighs 9,783 pounds. And this arduous journey has been most arduous. The banker is sick. The carpenter is sick. The butcher, the baker, the algebra maker. Your fellow pioneers are hanging on by a spool of flax. Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the River. Yes. Yes you are. If anyone has any questions, comments, criticisms. Mostly just the first two. You don't have to have questions, but I'll stay up here and be awkward for a little while in case. Okay. I didn't even notice there was a microphone.

Yeah, there's a microphone here, everyone. Did you prefer the simplicity of shooting a buffalo or B, the Chinese challenge of shooting a rabbit?

That is a very good question. I think I preferred the simplicity of shooting the buffalo because if I remember correctly, at least on the version I have, the buffalo made it. Buffalo made a noise when they died. It wasn't like a dying, scary buffalo, like I'm in pain noise. It was more of a big thud, which you don't really get with a sort of rabbit, but it was good if you just needed to fire off a couple of rounds of little pixelated bullets to just drive them to the heart of some bunnies was good. Good thing. I honestly don't eat meat. Yes.

Oh no. You can continue on.

I don't have to stop there. Please go.

So I was wondering, in reading your reviews, you've gotten a lot of comparisons to a lot of well known people and I was wondering, what is that like, is it helpful? Is. Well, obviously it has to be helpful in some regard, but what does that do to you as a writer? Maybe the next time you're, you know, trying to write something.

Yeah, that's. I guess I'll find out. But I mean, it's interesting. There have been some really nice comparisons. A couple of people said that I was sort of some sort of modern approximation of Dorothy Parker, but Dorothy Parker was suicidal, so that's a little bit scary. She swallowed a bottle of shoe polish like Kitty Dukakis, like swinging rubbing alcohol in the corner. But yeah, it's really incredibly flattering. But what I hope, I think when people make those comparisons, they do it because it's a humor collection. So they think, well, this is as funny as or not as funny as. And it's hard to quantify that. What I hope is similar with those people is that there's sort of a. There's a heart behind them. You know, I read like a David Sedaris or David Rykoff and stuff like that. And I just feel like I don't know the humor. There are a few lines that I'll remember, one liners, but it's mostly the stories and the essays that I remember. So hopefully that'll take some of the pressure off of being funny all the time.

If you swallow shoe polish, we'll assume it's accidental. Even if it happens twice, that's true. Do you have any reflections on Super Mario Bros?

Do I have any reflections on Super Mario Brothers? All I know is all I really remember is the giant world. Wasn't there a giant world like Level 3 or something like that where there was just. Everything was really big and I feel like I'll reference that a lot. I referenced. I actually. Well, I didn't say it out loud, but I thought it when I first got here to Google and there's the big sort of wooden thing and it just seemed like the kind of thing that, you know, you could hop on one end and maybe like a seesaw it would go. But I never made it very far. On Super Mario Bros. There was a movie that came out called the King of Kong. Do you know this movie? It's amazing. It's like a Christopher Guest movie, but it's real and it's got the best villain I've seen in ages. It's basically about, you know, sort of classic gamers and their competitiveness and, you know, kill screens and all sorts of. I don't know. As a fan of video games, I liked it, but I couldn't relate because I never got far in many games except for War and Gun Trail. Thanks, thanks.

Thanks for coming today.

Thank you.

I read a piece of yours in Salon and then I read the letters and it seems to me that authors who publish on the web these days are living in a very different world because within two days they'll have three dozen comments from people who do not feel restrained in any way. And I wondered if you even read them and what kind of effect it has on you to get that kind of instantaneous and often very snarky feedback.

Well, it's interesting because the piece that you're referring to is a sort of very edited down version of an essay in this collection called One Night Bounce about sort of my attempts to have a one night stand fail. And you know, I kind of knew it wasn't going to be pretty. And in fact, the editor told me before it ran, you shouldn't read the letters. I'm like, it's like, don't cut the red wire. You know, of course I'm going to read the letters now that you've said that. But so I, you know, I think it's just, it's a little bit difficult, but it's like, you know, you have to just sort of, you can tell a lot of the times it's very transparent where people are coming from if people have read other pieces of media, if people are annoyed, or if people, you know, maybe it's not so much as a simple sort of cattiness. Sometimes it's just the wrong age group. You know, someone will say, this is so horrible. Or someone who's like, you know, entering into a site like Salon with a heavy political mindset and thinking, my God, like, are you encouraging, you know, date rape or something insane that is not remotely in there. So, you know, you learn to take it with a bit of a grain of salt. But it is sort of a risk you take by publishing online, certainly.

Could you talk a little bit more about this disastrous Maxim article and what happened? Is that in the book or is it.

It's not. It's on the back of the book. So it's physically on the book.

Yes.

Can you describe what the article is about or what do you think might have happened with that? Did you actually contribute to that being poorly selling or do you think it was just bad luck?

Oh, well, what happened was it was the women of One Tree Hill. That show on the cw. Yes, exactly. And they were actually all sort of annoyingly intelligent. I wanted them to be really dumb and they weren't. I couldn't trick them into anything. And one of them had actually had a lot of experience. There's one girl, Hilary Burton, I think, who. Who used to be on trl. So she used to be on my side of the fence and was interviewing people. So she was, you know, sort of on her game. And so all that really came out. I just couldn't bring myself to ask them, you know, where they shop for underwear or their relationships and things like that. So all that came out that the most scandalous, Maxim friendly thing I got was a story about, like one night when they were drunk at karaoke. And I wasn't that friendly, but so I thought it was me. But apparently what happened was if you have three women on the COVID it's a pretty simple formula not to sort of, you know, be disparaging towards the male gaze, but if you can't just. If they can't just focus on one woman and all the assets therein on the COVID and there's three women, it's like the eye doesn't know what to do and the camera's not close up enough. And then that, combined with the fact that they wouldn't take their clothes off past a certain point, made it officially the worst selling issue of the magazine's history.

I'm wondering if I can ask an encore Question an encore question or do an encore. My question was, you said that you've never read this particular essay out loud, but it seemed like you have such a consciousness of the way words are phrased. Paired algebra maker, pixelated proxy. Is there a lot of a process while you're writing where it's almost like the sound comes before the meaning, if that makes any sense? Where you almost think how a word or a pairing might sound, and then you think, oh, that actually means what I want it to do.

You know what I mean?

What luck. Yeah, that's a great question because it's got a really nice compliment embedded in it. Thanks. But I think that there's obviously a very conversational tone. If I catch myself actually being. What's funny is it's actually the reverse in a way of what I think. I never really thought about it, but I think a phrase like pixelated proxy comes from me thinking I haven't really done anything shiny in a couple of lines, you know, and so something you wouldn't probably say, you know, something I'll just like. So actually, the stuff that sounds the best is probably actually the stuff I would say, say the least in casual conversation, even though the tone of it is generally, you know, kind of conversational, if that makes sense. I think I had another thought, but I don't remember what it was.

Hey, it's a simple question, but I'm sure there's an interesting story behind it. The name of the. Or the title of the book. I was told there'd be a cake. Just curious. I don't see, like a chapter in.

There that's on purpose, actually. It's. I feel like I'll read a lot of. I mean, mostly short story and essay collections, but I guess this would also apply to poetry or cookbooks or anything where there's a sort of series of, you know, distinct kind of pieces compiled into one book. I think it puts a sort of inordinate amount of pressure on that one essay or that one. I thought about it. There are certain essays that I, you know, thought, well, maybe I'll toss it on the COVID And it would not only put too much pressure on that essay, but I was like, well, people are going to read it, and it doesn't really embody the entire collection. And then I was just sort of tearing my hair out trying to think of a title. And it was almost like to really leave an out of office message when you leave the office and you do the fake ones a little bit, you know, where you're like, oh, okay. It's Sloan. I'm not going to be in the office. And Damn it. And you almost are tempted to leave that one with that no one's information where you're just like, and I'm talking to myself, click. That's kind of where this title came from in terms of me sitting around. I'm like, what if I called it that? That might be kind of funny. And sure enough, it embodied what I want it to, which was sort of the comic disappointment kind of theme of it. So that's where it comes from, but it's not actually in the book. Thanks. You're welcome.

Since I noticed that so many of us are kind of leafing through your book right now and we have a few minutes, could we ask you to read another. We actually have several minutes, not just a few. Should we read another essay from your book?

Yeah, I mean, I read a very. I read a very short one. I should probably read another short one. Let's see. Hold on, please. Let me find. Okay, I'm gonna read a wee one. They're weird. They're all. They're all very short or very long. I apparently did not do this, you know, in answer to the other gentleman's question, apparently did not do this with a mind towards reading them out loud in a nice neat segment. Okay, this one is gonna be called the Height of Luxury, which I now have to find. Okay, so these are actually, I guess, two about childhood, although most of them take place in sort of the semi modern era of my existence. Okay. This is called the Height of Luxury. The night before I turned 16, I was digging through my mother's jewelry box, pulling out old necklaces and those impossibly thick gold stick pins that women used to wear in wool coats. This rummaging was a favorite hobby of mine, but on this particular evening, I was digging with a purpose. I had caught wind of a surprise party to be thrown in honor of my burgeoning breasts. Teenagers are an unsubtle species, and the flood of seemingly random phone calls inquiring about my birthday plans led me to the only logical conclusion. Surprise party. Plus, I had never been bat mitzvahed, and I knew my parents felt I was owed a DJ and some Mylar balloons I would need to accessorize. I was not prepared to turn 6. My mother had taught me no female skills. I didn't know how to dress, how to use an eyelash curler, how to write in script, whereas they should create a font after my mother's handwriting. To this day, I Have no idea how to use an eyeliner, but I'm willing to forego anything you have to sharpen before applying to your face. But I did know about jewelry. I knew what a cabochon amethyst was before I could tie my shoes like like a featherless magpie. I was obsessed with all things sparkly. My sister took the fixation one step further when she became one of the youngest patent holders in the United States at the age of 14 when she invented magnetic jewelry clasps. She grew up to become a jewelry designer. But my fascination with jewelry, and specifically my mother's, was more sentimental than mechanical. I loved digging through her collection, asking where's this from? And this one. If I was lucky, she'd let me go down to the kitchen and and retrieve the Bremner wafers tin which contained all of her special occasion jewelry. Putting valuable things in the kitchen was a tip she'd read about in Red Book or an insurance pamphlet. And it stuck. Should thieves have broken into our house and poured themselves bowls of cereal, they would have found all four of our passports. My last evening as a 15 year old, I had the Bremner wafers tin between my legs on her bed. Suddenly I saw something roaming free and sparkly at the bottom of the tin. I pushed aside the rounded boxes and necklace sleeves to reveal a diamond ring I had never seen before. It was a princess cut diamond with two round stones on either side and a pink gold band that did not seem like something my mother would wear. I glanced across across the room. She was at her desk with a bag of cotton balls. Removing nail polish, I tried the ring on. I was unaware that people kept spare engagement rings. If they did, it seemed like something the sultan's wife would do. The height of luxury. But we only lived in the height of suburbia. And this one. I held up the ring. Oh. She waved. That's from Richard. Who the hell is Richard? My first husband. Now, it should be noted that my mother has a long history of being disturbingly unperturbed by what normal people deem perturbing. Certain, certain things simply don't strike her as worthy of a sit down. Home after college My first year, I went on a hyper nostalgic rampage through the basement files, smiling at old photographs and science certificates from when it was just called science. One day you turn around and social studies has become Chilean fiefdoms of the 14th century and that's how you know you're in college. At the bottom of the drawer was a thin album of drawings I had done, including one crepaw on oak tag, age 8, of a teddy bear crying hysterically and wearing dealy boppers and holding a windmill. In thick black writing, I had scrawled the following across the bottom of the page. Teddy bears are best because sometimes they understand it's nice to be alone. Jesus, I said out loud and brought the drawing down to the kitchen table, where my parents were reading the paper. You didn't think this was cause for concern? My mother studied the drawing. You're always kind of old for your age, if you know what I mean. Yes, I've heard profound depression as a sign of maturity. What if I had drawn four stick figures with no mouths and labeled it family? Oh, honey, she said, rubbing my back. You were too talented for stick figures. But you used to steal our toothbrushes. That's right, I said. Now I was beaming, full of the kind of glee you experience when you remember last night's dream dreams. Sometime past noon the following day, my father looked up from the paper. You used to steal our toothbrushes when you were angry with us. It's true, I did. I bore the plight of the youngest like a pro. Not only was I the youngest of my immediate family, but of all cousins in every direction, I often felt left out. And if I was especially unhappy about it, I'd sneak upstairs during a holiday dinner, collect all the toothbrushes and line them up at the bottom of my closet. Then I'd hang out with our cat, crack open the door, and watch the before bed chaos ensue. So thrilled was I to have this memory back that it didn't occur to me that this, too, might have been cause for concern. My mother never thought to come up and look for me. I knew you'd come down your own time, she said. But I never did come down for breakfast. The next morning, you did. I could have been constructing toilet bombs up there, but this is her way so the night before my 16th birthday, she was only confirming what I already knew of her kookiness. It could strike anywhere at any time, and most often in the form of nonchalance or forgetfulness. Still, never before had such pertinent information slipped through the parenting cracks. You never told me you were married before. I didn't. I thought I had. You didn't. I thought I had. My mother's was an ironclad logic and impossible to penetrate. One would think a previous marriage would have come up over the course of 16 years. One would be mistaken. It seems strange to think of my mother's life before our little family. I was aware that she had one, a life and a history as well, but never had it been brought into such sharp relief. I was aware of her past, the way we are, of the dinosaurs. Sure, they existed, and there's ample proof in the form of large, indisputable bones, but I've never imagined one alive like snoring in the master bedroom down the hall. They were divorced after 51 weeks of matrimony. Richard turned out to be a real prick. He was very into the barefoot and pregnant thing. Not that they ever had a kid together. I don't know. They fought, he shoved her once, and he wasn't particularly fun at any time. He also tried to block the doorway. When she left him, my mother ducked under his arm, ran into her car, and drove away. I remember thinking that this was was somehow romantic as it pinpointed the actual moment of my mother's departure, something you don't really see a lot of outside television. People don't slam doors without opening them five minutes later because it's raining and they forgot their umbrella. They don't stop dead in their tracks because they realize they're in love with their best friend. They don't say, I'm leaving you, Jack, and fade to a paper towel commercial. She and Richard lived in Delaware, and the law in the books in 1969 was one of those ancient east coast toasty stipulations that if a woman left her husband, she was obligated to leave him with a bed, a chair, and a horse. My mother left him with a futon, a giant beanbag, and the cat. They never spoke again. I screamed for my sister Dina. Did you know that mom was married before? Sure, she said. She seemed annoyed to have been summoned from a conversation on her much coveted private phone line to Richard. To Richard. I mimicked and tossed up my arms. Your father and I really did think you knew, my mother added, twisting the cap back into the nail polish remover. I wonder what else she might not be telling me. Was my mother a spy? A fly by night dominatrix? A daughter of the American Revolution? Was there a dusty stack of wedding albums in the attic from all of her previous marriages? Did dad know? Suddenly it seemed that my mother's casual parenting was reserved for me. I had always chalked up my feelings of isolation as a child to just being a child. What kid doesn't feel growing? What kid doesn't grow up feeling left out of the loop? Just being under 4ft tall will do it. But here, under the same roof, was the perception of my mother as a responsible, basic information sharing human being. And, albeit unintentionally, I was being left out of it again. Fine. I put the ring back into its mock velvet box and shoved it in the can. That's totally fine. You people call me when it's time to tell me I'm adopted. With that, I marched down to the kitchen and heaved the family jewels back into the pantry. I got ready for bed, furiously scrubbing my eyeliner free face and brushing my teeth like I was trying to erase them. I looked down at the other candy colored brushes. Content to be in their holder, I spat into the sink. In less than 24 hours, it would be my big day. Hugs given, photos taken, secrets whispered. For one night only. It would be natural for people to tell me everything and I would have to pretend that I didn't see any of this coming. Listening to competing tales from proud friends who fancied themselves spies in the making, thrilled by how slyly they threw me off the scent of celebration. I would be left out no longer. I practiced my surprise face in the mirror, a slightly happier version of the who the hell is Richard? Face. I made a dramatic O with my mouth and put my hand on my heart. Then I put the toothbrush back in line with the others and went to bed. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you guys for having me. Yeah, this was great.