Thank you to the lovely people at MCD x FSG for my copy of Look Alive Out There by Sloane Crosley.  All thoughts and images are my own. 

THE DETAILS:

Title: Look Alive Out There
Author: Sloane Crosley
Genre: Personal essays
Pub date: April 3, 2018
Read if you like: laughing out loud, How to Murder Your Life, David Sedaris, Yes Please.

MORGAN’S THOUGHTS:

Ok, book worms, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.  Crosley’s writing is self-deprecating and witty and the situations she finds herself in are completely absurd and undeniably relatable all at once.  Seriously, as I’ve thought back on my experience of reading this collection of essays, I keep remembering different moments, each one funnier than the next.

If you’re looking for a read to make your stomach hurt from laughing so hard, to make you question why anyone ever lives in NYC, or to make you feel that someone else out there gets what it is to be a woman, pick up this collection of essays.  They brought some light to my life in the best way. There’s a bit of everything in this collection: swingers, good neighbors, bad neighbors (really, really bad neighbors), European adventures, medical procedures, domain names held for hostage, and so much more. Crosley can capture the smallest experience that I have absolutely lived through but never put into words before.  Or she’s verbalizing an experience I pray to god I never have but if I do have it, I hope I can come out laughing like she did. 

There’s something honest in these essays about the experience of simply being a human in 2018.  The hustle, the fun, the sacrifices – it’s all there, amidst a whole heap of humor.

SYNOPSIS: (AS TOLD BY THE BACK OF THE BOOK)

From the New York Times-bestselling author Sloane Crosley comes Look Alive Out There―a brand-new collection of essays filled with her trademark hilarity, wit, and charm. The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really. 

Fans of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number know Sloane Crosley’s life as a series of relatable but madcap misadventures. In Look Alive Out There, whether it’s scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on Gossip Girl, befriending swingers, or staring down the barrel of the fertility gun, Crosley continues to rise to the occasion with unmatchable nerve and electric one-liners. And as her subjects become more serious, her essays deliver not just laughs but lasting emotional heft and insight. Crosley has taken up the gauntlets thrown by her predecessors―Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris―and crafted something rare, affecting, and true. 

Look Alive Out There arrives on the tenth anniversary of I Was Told There’d be Cake, and Crosley’s essays have managed to grow simultaneously more sophisticated and even funnier. And yet she’s still very much herself, and it’s great to have her back―and not a moment too soon (or late, for that matter).