Sloane Crosley is best known for her quietly hilarious personal essays, collected in two best-selling books, "How Did You Get This Number" and "I Was Told There'd Be Cake." With her newest work, "The Clasp," Crosley is venturing into new territory: fiction. The novel, inspired by Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace," is a love-triangle comedy of manners told in Crosley's signature irreverent style.
In a phone interview, Crosley talked about her new book, its hilarious trailer and why it should make you show up to your book club.
On coming back to her first love, fiction:
I had wanted to write a novel in college. [My first draft] was pretty bad. One night, I poured myself a nice glass of alcohol and went through thinking, “What can I salvage?” I came up with one sentence. I had the physical pages, and I scattered them on the floor, dramatically. I came up with one line — and it’s not even in “The Clasp.” One line — out of 300pages, that’s not a good ratio.
[The draft] read like something that was started by an undergrad who has maybe read too much Raymond Carver. I wanted to write a novel that was simultaneously literary and as funny as I can make it — one that really encouraged these characters to leave the house. In the case of “The Clasp,” leave the country. That was my little dream.
On rediscovering Guy de Maupassant and “The Necklace”:
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It’s not necessarily my favorite short story. It’s one I reread while I was working on the novel, and I just found it so much more powerful than I remember it being. We have this tendency to categorize it as this little O. Henry-esque short story with the twist ending. And it has a lot of depth and a lot of very real tragedy to it.
On her writing influences:
Joan Didion, obviously. I [also] cut my teeth on Dorothy Parker and David Sedaris. Then there are certain individual pieces that stick with me so much, Like [Laura Hillenbrand's] "A Sudden Illness" that I cannot get through without crying.
I'm also very influenced by fiction and always have been. Some of my favorites are "White Angel" by Michael Cunningham, Lorrie Moore's [stories], John Cheever's "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor." Anything that has a killer ending.
On her book trailer, starring Amanda Seyfried:
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You should’ve seen the outtakes and the stuff we made her say. At some point, we were just feeding her random things to say. It was really fun.
“The Clasp” is essentially a love triangle and a comedy of errors, but it’s a tribute to another form of art that’s not in the novel — the short story. I’ve always loved that. Books about paintings. Movies about operas. Crossing over to the other side of the artistic aisle. It’s texturizing. And fun. I always have created for all of my books a physical object in conjunction.
[For “I Was Told There’d Be Cake”] there were really large-scale dioramas that I then did a stop-action film to go with it.
For my second book, I made a series of paper dolls based on the essays, and then Sloane Tanen of "Bitter With Baggage" made a series of chicken dioramas for them. And with this — I did the trailer and also my friend Lisa, who runs Lulu Frost, made a necklace.
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On book club delinquency:
I’m not in a book club. I feel like I would just be delinquent.
I hope “The Clasp” lends itself to book clubs. Friends who have read it have offered that strange compliment “Oh, my gosh, I read your book in three nights” or “I plowed right through it.” I know it’s a compliment, but part of you is like that’s cool, that’s five years of my life. Maybe chew your food before you swallow it.
Julia Carpenteris a digital audience producer at The Washington Post.
At 7p.m. Oct. 21, Sloane Crosley will be at Sixth and I, 600 I St. NW.
Liked that? Try these:
The Clasp
A Novel
By Sloane Crosley. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 385 pp. $26
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