A successful book publicist throws it all away to follow her dream — writing her own book

Sloane Crosley had a successful career as a book publicist. What she really wanted to do, however, was write a novel. So she quit her job and started writing full time. 

“It felt like an Onion headline. You know, ‘Nice Girl From Suburbs Leaves Good Job For No Health Insurance,’” Crosley says.

Still, a career working with full-time authors made Crosley’s late-in-life job change more conceivable. Also, she says, she was too scared to fail. 

“I am largely motivated by fear. It's really worked very well for me so far. And one of the things I did when I quit was tell the New York Times I was writing a novel. So I thought ‘Well, now I'm beholden to do it.’ That’s the larger motivation to write every day — this gauntlet had been thrown.”

At the beginning of “The Clasp,” Crosley sends the three main characters in her book, who are old college buddies, to a friend’s wedding together. There they discover that they still have old love-triangle feelings for each other. After that, Crosley sends them on on international trip, and pulls them into a mystery involving a fabulous antique drawing. 

“I wanted them to leave the house. And I wanted them to be both sort of rewarded and punished for their inertia. You know, as amusing as you can possibly make dialogue, I think that it's indulgent to do a 300-page description of the ice in someone's whiskey glass and an oak tree. I mean, leave. Get out of the country,” Crosley says. 

Sloane has already published two successful best-selling collections of essays, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” and “How Did You Get This Number?”

For her novel, however, she turned for inspiration to a short story, "The Necklace" by 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant.

Guy de Maupassant's story centers around a woman who wants to climb the social ladder. Her husband procures her an invitation to a ball, but instead of being excited, the woman is upset because she doesn’t have anything to wear. She borrows an expensive necklace from a wealthy friend, goes to the party and has a wonderful time. On the way home, however, the woman realizes she’s lost the necklace. She and her husband sell or mortgage everything they can to buy a replacement, and then spend the next years of their lives trying to work off the debt. At the end of the story, the woman runs into her rich friend again. When the rich friend sees what’s happened, she tells the woman, “Oh my dear, it was glass. It was fake.” 

“It's this very neat, almost fablesque story that I could hang my hat on,” Crosley says. “And it also had these very contemporary themes of wish fulfillment and love and class and wealth and striving. It just became this heartbeat between or for each of the characters.”

“The Clasp” was published on October 6, 2015. 

This story first aired on PRI's Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.