When I speak with Sloane Crosley over the phone on the release date of her excellent new collection of essays, Look Alive Out There, it’s abundantly clear we’re going to get along. That’s partly because we’re both the type of writers who don’t utter the words “Joan Didion” without prefacing them with “Queen,” but also because Crosley speaks in much of the same fashion that she writes: with kinetic intelligence and a charmingly self-deprecating sense of humor that both flow effortlessly.
Crosley’s talent for oscillating from laugh-out-loud humor to stunning life realizations—sometimes in the space of a single page—will be on full display at Elliott Bay Book Company on Friday, April 20, when she reads from Look Alive Out There.
In Look Alive Out There, Crosley riffs with equal aplomb on everything from Ecuadorian mountaineering to the time her website domain was held hostage, imbuing each with humor and relatable self-examination. Any experience is fair game, including her lifelong infatuation with the West Coast, which she examines here in a story about hanging out with swingers in Northern California.