Posted on Sun, May. 11, 2008

I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE.

Sloane Crosley. Riverhead. 230 pages. $14 in paper.

Butterflies, crazy neighbors, abusive bosses and overworked locksmiths -- none are safe from Sloane Crosley's wicked wit. In her first book, a droll collection of 15 essays, the Manhattan resident winkingly eviscerates bridezillas who ask their attendees to lose five pounds and wax their legs and rude houseguests who leave an unwelcome tidbit behind. But she saves the sharpest knives for herself.

''Being blessed with one or two thoroughly selfless friends, I can say with a solid degree of authority that I am a selfish person,'' she writes about her stint as a (unreliable, foul-mouthed) volunteer at the Museum of Natural History's butterfly exhibit. ``I spontaneously forget the names of more people than not, unless I want to make out with them. I will take the last square of toilet paper off the roll without thinking twice.''

Crosley chronicles her utter failure at veganism and inability to be a strict vegetarian due to a sushi weakness. She reveals a skeleton that once lurked in her closet (actually, in her kitchen drawer): a cache of plastic toy ponies. Their final destination makes for a hilarious, only-in-New-York scene.

This New York is not the one you'll see in a glamorous chick-lit novel or on The Real Housewives of New York City. Crosley's New York is a city in which your downstairs neighbor is digging a hole to China through his floor and the restaurant next door is undergoing 7 a.m. renovations that could attract the attention of the Richter scale.

Despite such aggravations, Crosley seems to enjoy a charmed, even fantastical urban existence. She has never been mugged, and her wallet has been returned to her each of the six times she left it in a cab.

''Perhaps it's a post-post-post-9/11 humanity that's trickled down to everyday courtesies like not stealing other people's wallets,'' she muses.

In one of the funniest essays, Crosley writes about a nightmare moving day that involves an abundance of cash and a humorous locksmith.

Before she moved to the city and started a career in publishing, Crosley was a suburban kid of the '80s and '90s longing for something to set her apart other than her first name ('Number of times I have heard the words, `Oh, like the cancer hospital': 851''). Her background doesn't provide much drama, aside from the moment at age 15 she found out that her mother had been married before.

But Crosley didn't need a twisted childhood or warped coming-of-age to create great stories; she can rely on her extraordinary ability to mine normal life for comic gold.

Hannah Sampson is a Miami Herald staff writer.