LAURENCE MACKINreviews How Did You Get This Number?By Sloane Crosley, Portobello, £12.99
Sloane Crosley opens this book with a brilliantly executed chapter on travelling alone.
On a whim, she picks a random point on a globe and jets off to the Portuguese capital. Hardly the stuff of Marco Polo, you might think. But, it’s the depths of winter; Crosley speaks no Portuguese; and, as we learn in later chapters, has something of a crippling inability to negotiate her way even along routes that are intimately familiar to her.
This is a promising opening and Crosley freshly articulates the struggle that many single travellers go through – the mild paranoia, the pacing in the hotel room working up the courage to leave and the realisation that travelling is the best gift you can give yourself.
Crosley is based in New York and can barely stagger down the block beneath the weight of her own existential neuroses. Luckily, she has the sharp wit and cutting lines we’ve come to associate with the independent republic of Manhattan.
She finds herself in absurd situations and is not only aware of the circumstances that have brought them about, but is a willing architect in her own discomfiture.
Crosley is at the end of her 20s and winningly captures that stumble into true adulthood, trying to get to grips with her own life with all the sangfroid of a teenager and the anxiety of someone in middle age.
The result is generous, terrifically bright and charmingly unhinged.
lmackin@irishtimes.com