Letters to the Editor
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Perhaps the audience for chick lit "true confessions" is now men
Even in the old days, chick lit appealed to two audiences: liberated women and horny boys borrowing mom's copy of Fear of Flying.
And then at some point, I think it during Clinton One, mom tossed Jong and started teaching her son what grandma had taught her: that girls don't want it as much he does. Mom had figured out that the sexual revolution was a bad deal for women. That seems to be the underlying theme in so much policy and middlebrow intellectual discourse these days. Abstinence training at school, born again virginism, etc etc. conservative stuff though now with a feminist overlay. The madonna/whore (Hillary/Monica) dichotomy returned, though often with women manning the taboo switch. The "she wants it" storyline was again relegated to porn, particularly the new reality-tv types.
These days, intellectualized women are ambivalent about their sisters admitting they want sex, particularly of the zipless variety. But their overeducated brothers would probably love to pick up Crosley's essays at the store and search for any good stuff. Not that they'd be caught dead buying it.
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A whimper, not a bang
The charming flourishes and clever anecdotes aren't as charming or clever as she thinks they are and it becomes distracting.
Good writers are able to write about themselves without being narcissistic...it's tedious to those who don't live in that world.
This is a good explanation of why this article strikes most of us as an example of bad writing. The author is too wrapped up in herself to make her naiveté and ineptitude engaging or humorous, and it is precisely on this level that the piece fails. It annoys the hell out of the reader to slog through three pages hoping there is going to be some kind of payoff, but it ends with a whimper, not a bang...
Sorry...meh...I couldn't resist ending on a bad joke.
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It's gonna happen, trust me
I can just envision this story prompting a zillion other budding wannabe lit-chicks (or lit-dudes) to write about the same damn subject matter. EVERYONE has a story to tell. They'll say: If Sloane can make a bundle writing about this stuff, then why can't I? MY story'll be even BETTER!
Jeeze.
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The Least Satisfying Five Minute Fling My Spirit Ever Had On Salon..
He's right. I clicked my Calender ready to laugh, was it April 1'st already? No it wasn't. Salon's editorials are a daily ritual, this is a gourmet supermarket for food for thought, and we are never charged, and this is fair to say: Salon has never insulted us but in this borish, asinine and totally uninteresting front page article, they've dropped the ball on their laurels this week. Can anything in a single article, convince a first time reader a Premium subscription is a sham so effectively?
Consider editor, three things that simply do not exist here: insightfulness, topical relevance, thought provocativeness to conceivably anyone. It's like the least eventful episode of Sex & The City with a dollup of malaise. She's selling a book that apparently the same Java paragraph generator was used to author also.
So basically you are a case of human insipidness that transcends gender and whose attempts at base human intimacy are a mockery; a rare occurrence to be sure, much like sociopathy but not - you'll be informed by others also - remotely worth anyone's time reading or thinking about. Hindsight is an important faculty, it would tell you if you possessed it for instance, explaining at length what psychologically healthy individuals know instinctively as a confounding mystery, and solved by dice throws of tacky would irritate for perfectly valid reasons.
Considering all this, and the financially lucrative careers available for the shallow and colorless, you chose the life of a writer. Except writing is half a creative profession, driven by personal communication skills and sustained by appreciation of hallmarks: constructive insight, whimsical and ironic associations, and the reward of intimately relating to others. Everything in short you pointlessly reveled in here you fundamentally lack, and what lacks in this regard more than any I've ever seen on Salon.
You got your point across.
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If it's any consolation, Sloane...
...your book will soon be getting laid big-time. It will be splayed out in the Barnes & Noble bargain bin under all the other books by talentless self-promoters with nothing to say.
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Well...
This excerpt doesn't really hold my interest...in fact, judging from the write-up on Amazon, it's quite possibly the least interesting pick of the vignettes referenced in the editorial reviews.
Sloane, if you had posted an excerpt about the "Bring Your Machete To Work Day" story, I think we might have gotten a better taste of just what kind of "biting" humor your book really may have. But if this is the best excerpt you can pick, it doesn't bode well.
But remember folks, this is not John Adams biographical quality stuff here...of course, it doesn't need to be, and Sex-and-the-City-esque writing does have an audience...but this excerpt really doesn't motivate me to cross over and step into that other world.
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We love those young, sexed-up, smarmy white women, don't we?
It's not about writing... not about fear or lifestyle or anything at all to do with craft.
The feedback is consistent with Kind Green Jealousy. Yes. Oh the boys don't want sex with the author - they want notoriety and drinks with her - then praise. They wanna' get paid too!
If you can pick a topic to write about, and then get such published in Salon, maybe everybody already knows you can get LAID. It really is the "publishing come-on" that chokes in their little gizzards, you know. I know a little bit about jealousy - my books sell more than any author's on the planet, and all I do all day is... treapse about my house - half naked, horny - obsessing about fame and billion-dollar Enlightenment.
She may as well have been Heavy Oprah, at war with Normalsize Oprah - all the good it would do to promote "bendover" fiction and "What-you-know-about" writing mythology - to satisfy these guys.
Whatever happened to watching a football match instead of simply leering at an intimate, obsessed, soft-dorm account of "tentative litchick" life?
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I liked it...
I liked the article and I thought is was rather more profound than most readers seem to give it credit for.
I especially liked this phrase:
Plus, bringing him back to my bed made me feel like a prostitute whereas going to his place made me feel like a call girl... because somehow it gets to the essence of the ambiguity of so many sexual situations.
The idea of sex with a stranger (Erica Jong's "zipless fuck") appeals in the fantasies of the mind, but as soon as you get into an intimate situation with someone, then they are no longer a stranger and the fantasy evaporates--as happened with the Italian rapper.
I guess part of the reason I like this writing is that it coincides with my own experience. I have had many one night stands, but some of them have turned into long-lasting relationships, and even lifelong nonsexual friendships, because you can't have sex with someone without coming into close proximity with them, and you can't come into close proximity without getting to know the person attached to the body, sharing soap, towel, and coffee, and making the baby steps that lead to a real relationship (in some cases). In fact I tend to perceive every one night stand I have ever had as a type of failed courtship that did not get off the ground.
At least that is my experience, and this is the author's too, so I think this is good writing.
Of couse good writing needs good readers, and in that respect Ms. Crosley may have more of a problem.