Author Sloane Crosley on nitpicking, religion, and the ‘disgusting ooze’ of social media

The city was a parade of places shut down, left early from, arrived late to, sat in front of, met to say goodbye at,” says Lola, the hero of Sloane Crosley’s surreal new romcom Cult Classic. “If you wait long enough, any place will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs.”

Crosley’s novel finds a Rolodex-worth of Lola’s exes rise up out of the great beyond, bumping into her at restaurants and on street corners within days of one another. At first, she doesn’t understand what’s happening – it’s as if her entire dating history has converged within the two-mile radius of her Manhattan apartment. Whatever the source, though, the encounters prove useful, helping to answer Lola’s many what-ifs: what if she didn’t get engaged to the man she calls Boots, or the Big to her Carrie; what if she didn’t break up with the long-jumper she always had great sex with; what if she could choose to just re-set her life?

Crosley’s work – as a celebrated essayist and a fiction author – has always cross-stitched the surreal with the mundane. Wise truths are mined from outlandish premises. Like in her 2015 novel The Clasp, where quarter-life crises collide with a globe-trotting hunt for a missing necklace. Or her essay in which a diatribe against her aggressively loud student neighbours becomes a touching meditation on joy and ageing. Or when Crosley wrote about guest-starring as herself on Gossip Girl – as every New York literary fixture did in the late-Noughties – and Ed Westwick showed her videos in the make-up room of a horse being hit by a lorry. Starry and bizarre, absolutely. But also an empathetic piece about confidence, anxiety and feeling like an idiot in new places. A few years ago, when Crosley released essay collections such as I Was Told There’d Be Cake and Look Alive Out There, she’d often be asked whether zany things just happen to her. As if – a bit like Lola – she was the eye of an anecdote-primed tornado at all times.

“It’d be so funny if right now my ceiling caved in behind me,” the 43-year-old jokes over Zoom from her kitchen table in New York. “I never felt that. I think people forget that I definitely didn’t reinvent the wheel in this way.” She mentions other masters of the short-form, autobiographical, tragicomic essay: David Rakoff, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris. “[I write about] experiences that obviously were formative to me. If you could think of 12 impactful things in your life, you could do it with your eyes closed. Anybody could do it. I think you just need to draw out whether or not those stories are cocktail party fodder or if they have some sort of larger meaning behind them. Which is really funny, because it’s basically the plot of Cult Classic.”

An early reveal in the novel confirms that Lola’s encounters aren’t accidental, but are, in fact, the product of a wellness cult that monetises present-day romantic uncertainty – think Eternal Sunshine if it was set in motion by Gwyneth Paltrow. Plot aside, though, Crosley’s novel explores that very modern need to find significance in every experience; that a coincidence can’t just be a coincidence, but a sign from the universe. Where does she think that impulse comes from? “It’s sort of a solipsistic thing, right?” she says. “You do it to buttress your reality. You’re like, ‘Surely everything in my purview has meaning!’ Which is a crazy idea – like you’re not the white-hot centre of everything. But then I also think it’s this contemporary version of faith. So many people aren’t religious, but forces larger than yourself are the easiest thing in the world to believe in. So, if you don’t have some sort of life philosophy, and you’re plodding around from city to city and going on the tube or whatever, it seems comforting, it’s like a good kind of faith.”

Cult Classic is at its best when it illuminates just how chaotic so many of us have become. Crosley’s depiction of New York is one of shuttered buildings, mad billionaires, and a media climate on life support. The streets are lined with desperate twenty- and thirtysomethings on criminal wages, all punishingly surveying Instagram and Facebook for the latest information on their exes and frenemies. You can practically hear every Meg Ryan romcom character turning over in their grave. Crosley can imagine her book being written in a different era but says that our modern relationship to social media is essential to it. “I’m hardly a ‘welcome to my TED Talk’ social media expert, but I do feel like the internet supercharges our worst impulses,” she says. “If we had a short attention span before the internet, this has made it worse. If people have certain proclivities, this has made them more accessible. If one of your proclivities is being unable to let go of the past, or wanting to keep constant tabs on your ex-husband or everyone you’ve ever dated, then you’re just stuck in this sort of disgusting ooze of your past romances because of social media.”

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That specific strain of tech horror also feeds into Cult Classic’s genre, which is something of a grey area. It’s been described in some quarters as science fiction, which feels wrong. It’s definitely fantastical at times, but not so much that it tips outside of reality. It is zippy and dramatic and funny, playing sometimes like a conspiracy thriller, other times like a romantic comedy. Science fiction, though? Crosley screws up her face. “I just think it’s very realistic.”

“I don’t think the leap is that big,” she says. “You take wellness culture, and instead of focusing on adaptogen powders and yoga positions, you just focus on the control that everyone wants to have over their own bodies – only sped up. Or people selling a shortcut to help you get over your past. I don’t think that’s a massive leap [from what we have now]. It’s not Minority Report.”

I tell Crosley that I came away from the book wondering about very modern neuroses. It’s as if we’re presented with the intimate details of so many lives now – friends, family, celebrities, strangers – that all we can do is ask why we’re not living any of them. And if we’re not, why aren’t we? Why are we dating this person? Why are they dating us? “Is this what all my romantic dramas have been for,” Lola asks herself at one point in Cult Classic. “A life of palliative television?” Everyone just seems so miserable in their uncertainty, picking at scars only there because we picked at them in the first place. Fundamentally, I ask Crosley, do we ask too many questions?

“I don’t think we ask enough of the right things,” Crosley says. “Our nitpicky-ness is aimed in weird, superficial places, when we should question more [about] the basics of who someone is. And who you are and what you want and what someone else wants. Like, those are the things we should be nitpicky about. This is rich coming from me, I should add, as someone who’s basically made her entire career off of social etiquette and tiny little observational details, but that stuff is fun to me! I don’t necessarily think you should try someone for their crimes if they leave a wet towel on the bed.”

Actually, she reconsiders, “they probably should be tried for that. Like, were you raised in a barn?”

‘Cult Classic’ is out now via Bloomsbury