91I Was Told There’d Be Cake, mined
her coming-of-age and misadventures
in NYC.
But for all of Crosley’s writing
about her experiences, she prefers to
keep her romantic life private. She
rarely writes about dating in her per-
sonal pieces, and while we discuss
past boyfriends and dates, she only
obliquely references her current part-
ner. Which is why when she began
working on Cult Classic, her second
work of i ction, following her 2015
novel The Clasp, she saw an oppor-
tunity to freely tackle a subject she’d
been avoiding for years. “I was sort of
overdue to use a wealth of experience
in this way,” she says, then deadpans,
“I just didn’t want to use it for non-
i ction, because I’m not a snitch.”
While Cult Classic is a meditation on
love, albeit one that is i ltered through
fantasy and satire, it of ers a refresh-
ingly realistic, nonprecious attitude
toward modern romance. Like many
women, Lola is disenchanted with men
as an institution, and her cynicism
trickles down into her relationships.Romance:
‘the world’s
oldest cult’QUICK TALKElsewhere, characters are more fearful
of settling than they are of being alone;
one pessimistically dei nes marriage
as “agreeing to live in someone else’s
narrative,” while another quips that ro-
mance “may be the world’s oldest cult.”
The novel is far less concerned with
Lola’s happy ending than it is with her
coming to terms with her hang-ups
about love, commitment, and vulner-
ability. As a heroine, Lola is both fear-
less and fearful; armed with a sharp
wit, she’s more than a little bit skep-
tical, very opinionated, and slightly
messy. It was important to Crosley
that Lola have the space to be un-
apologetically l awed while learning
from her past. “I don’t think I have the
capacity to write a straight romance
novel,” she says. “I’m probably not
a romantic at my core, but it’s worse
than that: I’m a writer.” ▽CROSLEY: BEOWULF SHEEHAN