When a stressed-out Clive says they only have funding for one final encounter, Lola discovers something unsettling about the experiment. 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. 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.
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. 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. After Lola, 37, bumps into two exes in two days, she suspects it’s more than coincidence. (Apr.Crosley ( The Clasp) offers a witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City. Agent: Jay Mandel, William Morris Endeavor. This was my home now.” Crosley is exceedingly clever and has a witticism for all occasions, but it is her willingness to confront some of life’s darker corners with honesty and vulnerability that elevates this collection.
But as the dizziness is revealed to be a symptom of a rare and largely untreatable condition, the connection becomes fraught: “This was not some exotic destination that I would one day leave and report back on. “Cinema of the Confined” finds the author battling an extended bout of vertigo and drawing astute comparisons between travel writing and writing about illness.
“Wolf” involves a literal identity crisis as Crosley contends with a man holding her internet domain name hostage. In “Outside Voices,” the author tries to quiet a teenage neighbor’s nightly carousing without become crotchety and square in the process (“I bit the bullet and called 311, a placebo service for cranks on the brink”). Several essays are concerned with the tensions that arise in urban life. Crosley ( The Clasp), in her third collection of personal essays, continues her tradition of hilarious insight into the human condition, whether the human involved is scaling a 20,000-foot volcano in Ecuador or inadvertently flirting with a drugstore cashier.
0 kommentar(er)
