How Did You Get This Number

With charming honesty and good-natured sarcasm, Sloane Crosley, publicist and author of How Did You Get This Number describes what happens when the girl next door departs for the reaches of Portugal, Alaska, Paris, and a brothel-turned-residence in downtown Manhattan. After stumbling her way toward thirty, Crosley moved to New York City, where she earned enough disposable income to make the occasional flight to a destination wedding or indulge in a European vacation. Along her journey to popular publicist she tells of a fender bender with a moose, clowns she's befriended, tripped security alarms, and being rejected by hipsters. Equally funny childhood memories and faux pas exclusive to adulthood abound in the helter-skelter essay collection, whose only cohesion could be summed up by the old Ronald Reagan standby: "Mistakes were made." Indeed, Crosley's self-deprecation often provides a necessary balance to her precarious tightrope walk between naivete and ignorance: yes, she thinks uncomfortably low-ceilinged Parisian showers are similar to Thai amenities and yes, there's a tinge of ethnocentricity behind her statement, "when you are a novice traveler, London feels like Papua New Guinea." Yet Crosley is the first to comment on her own shortcomings. Her essays often lack a sense of development or poignancy, but the profusion of wisecracks and offbeat humor scattered throughout Number keep the laughs coming from Brooklyn to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur.