90 Time May 23/May 30, 2022
“ThaT’s ToTally The guy!” sloane Crosley yelps,
coming to an abrupt halt. She gestures at a gray-haired man
exiting a graiti- adorned brick building.
For the past 20 minutes, we’ve been booking it through
Manhattan’s Chinatown, past bustling produce stands and
purse vendors, to ind this former synagogue tucked away
on a quiet stretch of Rivington Street—a source of inspi-
ration for the author as she wrote her novel, Cult Classic,
coming June 7. On our way here, Crosley, who speaks like
she walks, a mile a minute, explained that it wasn’t just the
old temple that captured her attention, but also its cultur-
ally rich, if rapidly gentrifying, neighborhood. “There’s
something hidden about it,” she says. “There’s still so many
lives and cultures going on on the Lower East Side and in
Chinatown at once, it seems like fertile ground for a secret.”
Secrets are everything in Cult Classic, which centers on
the surreal yet relatable adventures
of Lola, a 37-year-old woman whose
private apprehension about spend-
ing the rest of her life with her iancé
escalates as she inds herself running
into a string of her ex-boyfriends, all in
the same ive-block radius downtown.
Someone, it seems, is invested in Lola’s
love life—and they’re using mysterious
methods to force a reckoning.
For Crosley, as for Lola, there are
no coincidences—and this man, now
standing outside the old synagogue,
is the proof. Maybe there’s still magic
left in the swiftly changing streets of
lower Manhattan. Maybe our three
wrong turns were actually part of a
larger plan, having nothing to do with
our mutual bad sense of direction and
refusal to use Google Maps. It’s all led
us to this moment, an opportunity to
meet the owner of the building, whom
Crosley emailed while she was writ-
ing to ask if she could see its interior, a
request he politely but irmly denied.
Within seconds, we’re bounding over
a pile of garbage bags to the other side
of the street, where Crosley introduces
herself to the man, charming him
enough that he not only agrees to read
her novel, but also hints that if he likes
it, she might inally get that tour.In the dIgItal age, the past is al-
ways just a Google search away. In
New York, where running into an ex
is a rite of passage, it can lurk around
every corner. For Lola, a romantic
with a cynical shell, the past functions
as a comfort, a pleasure, and at times,
a thrill; she hoards relics of her former
relationships in a shoebox, cherishing
memories as she avoids facing her fear
of commitment in the present.
A New Yorker for 22 years, Cros-
ley is no stranger to encountering
her past. When we stop for lunch at
Lucien, a longtime haunt of down-
town denizens, we’re seated at a table
where a photo of an ex-lame of hers
with the writer Fran Lebowitz smiles
down on our tartare. An attraction
to nostalgia runs through Crosley’s
body of work. After nearly a decade
as a book publicist, she became a
household name as an author thanks
to humorous irst-person essays: her
irst collection, the 2008 best seller◁Crosley’s novel
sees a woman
confronted
by her pastPROFILE
Chasing nostalgia
in New York City
BY CADY LANG
TIME OFF BOOKS