Cult Classic

Starred review from April 4, 2022
Crosley (The Clasp) offers a witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City. After Lola, 37, bumps into two exes in two days, she suspects it’s more than coincidence. Then her friend Vadis, with whom she used to work at a prestigious psychology journal, drags her to a meeting held by a secretive startup named Golconda run by their charming former boss, Clive Glenn. Clive is putting an obscure theory to the test involving meditation and technological manipulation, in which participants can lure people from their past for a final interaction and closure. Lola balks at the cultlike reverence the others show for Clive, as well as their New Agey vibe, but also hopes to clarify whether she really wants to marry her glassmaker fiancé, Boots. With Boots away for two weeks in San Francisco, she signs up and spends every evening having brief interactions with exes, then returning to Golconda for debriefing. When a stressed-out Clive says they only have funding for one final encounter, Lola discovers something unsettling about the experiment. The accounts of Lola’s reckoning with her romantic history are thoroughly hilarious (describing the rush of boyfriends past, she narrates, “I experienced these men as no one is supposed to experience them, as if being propelled from a T-shirt gun”), and the details of online dating, which made her “the victim of a metric ton of rejection,” are also sharply perceptive, rooting this very much in the real world. Crosley has found the perfect fictional subject for her gimlet eye. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME.

September 1, 2022

Crosley (The Clasp; I Was Told There'd Be Cake) narrates her page-turning novel about a skeptically engaged woman in her late 30s. Lola falls down the rabbit hole of past boyfriends after bumping into an ex outside a restaurant in Chinatown--but there's a lot more to it than that. This is also a novel about the budding cult of New Age influencers, algorithms, and how we make decisions about what we want. As she investigates her reluctance to fully commit, Lola does a postmortem on relationships that didn't work out. It's a delight to listen to Crosley read her work, transporting listeners to the dating scene in New York and expertly delivering moments of wry humor and witty banter. Lola's inner meditations on love, relationships, and gender dynamics are propelled by an exciting and mysterious subplot. VERDICT While the final events of the book are slightly less satisfying, the outcome doesn't affect one's overall enjoyment. At the heart of the story is Crosley's talent for unpacking the paradoxes of love, commitment, and societal convention with humor and sensitivity.--Halie Theoharides

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