I was very excited to read Sloane Crosley's new essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake. (It's one I was looking forward to with some anticipation just a few weeks ago.) It's blurbed by Jonathan Lethem ("What makes her so funny is that she seems to be telling the truth, helplessly"), Colson Whitehead, (Sardonic without being cruel, tender without being sentimental, Sloane Crosley will win you over with this delightful debut"), and AM Holmes, ("Crosley is a post-modern Mary Tyler Moore and this book is wry, generous, knowing - a perfect document of what it is to be young in today's world".

Okay, I know blurbs are just blurbs and not the end-all be-all of book reviewing but the reviews for this one have been good and it sounded fun. (Booklist compared her to Sarah Vowell of all people - my expectations were dutifully high.) Can you blame me for expecting to identify on some level (even though I'm a decade past the author's age group) with the situations she relates in her book? I might not be in my twenties but I do remember them (it has not been that long) and hey, funny is funny no matter what age the comedian. I thought the book would be funny. I didn't realize that in the twenty-something world, funny means shallow, silly and - dare I say it - stupid. This is a book written by someone who is supposed to be the "it girl" of NYC publishing but her humor just did not work for me.

In her first essay, "The Pony Problem", Crosley writes about a small collection of pony figurines that she has received from previous boyfriends. She doesn't know why she makes jokes about ponies; she doesn't like ponies, and she doesn't want to collect ponies. But at every gathering with friends she often makes a crack about a pony and thus guys think she likes them and so they buy them for her and after the breakups she puts them in a drawer and she doesn't know what to do with them. She is concerned that when she dies her parents will go through her apartment and find the ponies and be deeply disturbed by this discovery. She thinks about what will happen when her mother opens the drawer and sees the ponies:

"What is it?" my father would shout, imaging all the things you never like to think your father imagining: flavored condoms, pregnancy tests, a complete set of Third Reich collectors' cards.

"Look!" my mother would howl, picking up Ranch Princess Pony (with matching bridle and real horseshoe charm necklace!" by her faux flaxen mane. Just before she passed out.

Lesson #1 for the twenty-something girls: after you have really cleaned out the home of someone who died you will realize that everyone involved is far too overwhelmed to care about your strange little pony figurines. Mostly people open drawers, dump things in boxes and cry. They also get tired very easily, overwhelmed very quickly and frustrated by the loss of someone they loved. Really, your mother (who would probably not even be there as she would be far too upset) could give a rat's ass about the ponies.

Apparently death is something the twenty-somethings in Crosley's world still don't know much about.

With "Christmas in July" she revisits the horrors of summer camp. (How come you either have an amazing time at summer camp or a horrible time? Does no one just go, do camp stuff and go home? Why does it have to be life changing?) In this particular camp, Crosley (who is Jewish but not an "observant" Jew) finds herself in a very Christian world. Every July they observe Christmas and not just in an exchange presents kind of way but this camp actually puts on the whole "no room in the inn" play from holiday pageants everywhere and all the girls participate. Somehow Crosley's parents have no idea that she is attending a seriously religious camp and somehow she never tells them. (Although she says she did tell them about the pageant. How they didn't put two and two together is not explained in the essay.)

When you have a Christmas pageant in July you are attending serious Bible camp. I've been to plain old Bible camp and we didn't even go that far (we were too busy making popsicle stick tepees and jumping in the lake to dress up like Mary and Joseph). The movie Indian Summer notwithstanding, I've lost all my summer camp stories in a haze of hot and stickiness that was mercifully brief so I could get back to what really mattered: hitting the beach. My considerations of religion come from more than what some ten year olds had to say late at night. Do twenty-somethings still look for meaning like this in childhood moments? Do they still clutch their metaphorical blankey while the rest of us have moved on to the blankeys of our kids? (Or just moved on to the real world, period?) Is that why I read a certain degree of falsity in this essay about a Jewish kid attending Christian camp and insisting it was no big deal - and then writing for page after page about the big dealness of it?

Hmmm.

The essay that really has stayed with me though is "The Ursula Cookie". This is the one about Crosley's first job - ever. She's hired by Ursula who is in "book publishing" and I think is a publicist. Crosley is going to be her assistant. Ursula seems wonderful, life seems wonderful and because she has "a cast iron upper-middle-class work ethic that is akin to a superpower" Crosley is going to give this job her all. (How she got to be in her 20s with this big work ethic but never having had a job before is not explained.) All too soon we are in employment hell however as Ursula proves to be some kind of crazy. Now I could appreciate this - we have all worked for a wing ding at least once in our lives and have sympathies for others who get caught in the same predicament. But then Ursula starts throwing things at Crosley and because she has never had a job before and thus "didn't know enough to quit", she hides in the bathroom to get away from her psycho boss.

That's when the book ended for me. Someone throws things at you - "pens, junk mail, a blessedly unbound four-hundred-page manuscript - whatever happened to be in her hand at the time sailed in the general direction of my head" - and you didn't know you should quit? She spoke to you in the most appalling and insulting manner and you didn't know enough to quit? Had Crosley never quit a relationship, a friendship, a club or dull social event? Had she never walked out of a boring play, movie or dinner? Had she never told a sibling, cousin or distant relation to stop being a jerk over Thanksgiving dinner?

She didn't know enough to quit? How is that even possible? (We're not talking about someone who grew up in an abusive home and thus was ingrained to accept abuse and we're not talking about someone trapped in an abusive marriage who doesn't know how to support their children on their own. We're talking about The Devil Wears Prada kind of a crazy and a perfectly capable young woman. Just quit.)

And that - well that was just too twenty-something for me. See the minute an object goes flying at my head, I'm thinking about what I want to throw back. Going home and baking a cookie that looks like the thrower? That would never occur to me. Maybe I'm just too old for this kind of reminiscence - maybe I was always too old for this. Clearly, if these kinds of worries are what twenty somethings go through then I missed some relevant part of my twenties. (I did nail the bad romance part however.) I've never read a book that has such a narrow audience - and I wonder just what the heck Whitehead, Holmes and Lethem were thinking with those blurbs. Mary Tyler Moore was smart, wasn't she? I don't think she would have let Mr. Grant throw a stapler at her head - at least not the Mary I remember. (And Rhoda would have kicked his ass, but that's another story....)

Look this is a funny author but only if you find the situations she writes about to be funny. And that's where she lost me as a reader - they just didn't seem the same kind of humorous for me that they clearly were for her.

The first essay Crosley wrote, "Goodbye Columbus" is online at the Village Voice. This is the essay she sent out to friends, was persuaded to rewrite for the Voice and eventually led to the book. In it she recounts being locked out of two apartments on the same day - the one she was moving out of and the one she was moving into. All I could think as I read it was that while it was possible for a thirty-something woman to find herself in a similar circumstance, she wouldn't write about it. A thirty-something woman would get in, get out, and get on with it. And maybe that is what struck me about this whole collection - it's a life observed too closely and in a manner that quite frankly, some of us just don't have time for.