But far-flung as Crosley’s anecdotes and allusions are, there’s a giddy coherence to the collection. This is accomplished in part by Crosley’s voice, a weird, alluring intersection of Dorothy Parker–esque, Fran Lebowitz–ish archness and loopy, almost slaphappy sensibility. For example: “I laughed very hard. Wine shot up my nose, which I decided was God’s way of telling me it was time to switch to hard alcohol.” Or, “One day you turn around and ‘social studies’ has become ‘Chilean fiefdoms of the 14th century,’ and that’s how you know you’re in college.” Or, “I was going through a somewhat awkward phase at the time, both the ‘somewhat’ and the ‘awkward’ being total understatements.”

Ultimately, though, the collection is united by the way its zany episodes and poignant interludes transcend the author’s particular experience to gesture at something more universal—or at least regional. Crosley, 29, tells TONY that “each essay touches on the comedic disappointment of city life, and sometimes the transfer from suburban to city life.” When asked why this city is the subject and setting of so much literature, Crosley, who has a day job as a book publicist at Vintage, very politely points out the obvious: because so many writers live here.

Less obviously, she speculates, people write about their experiences in New York because they don’t want the details of their lives to get subsumed by all the noise. “Most of the writing about New York that I love addresses that the specificity of home, the very mundane and organic life running parallel to the infamous and surreal one,” she says.

This juxtaposition of the quotidian and the epic is a rich vein, and like many of her predecessors, Crosley mines it for comedy. It’s familiar territory—habitation, transportation, population—but her mordantly cheery perspective tweaks these topics, transforms them, turns them sideways. She offers neighbors whose eccentricities verge on the majestic (like the gentleman who, rather than risk the germs on his doorknob, detaches his front door from its hinges); argues for the necessity of factoring the vertical into residential square-footage measurements; revisits tyrannical Korean manicurists; and nails the Stockholm-ish syndrome suffered by entry-level publishing employees.

Crosley’s sharp eye and quick wit are often turned back on herself. Almost reflexively, she exposes her own quirks and qualms, duplicities and self-deceptions, blips of pathos and profound stupidity. Take, for example, her compulsive cookie-making. Or her obsession with one-night stands, thwarted by her apparently constitutional inability to have one. Or her collection of plastic horses. “I’m not exactly sure how the ponies happened,” Crosley hedges, but she does: each one is a gift from some hapless, well-meaning suitor who took note of her compulsive and clever references to ponies (“Can I get you something? Coffee, tea, a pony?”). It is in such moments of wincing self-awareness that many readers will hopelessly, helplessly, see themselves.

The author describes her writing strategy as recognition humor. “It’s the whole ‘We laugh because it’s true’ bit,” she explains. “Watching someone fall off their office chair is funny. But funnier is watching someone do that and then behave in a way I recognize—pretend it was on purpose or make a big show of checking the seat adjuster to see if it’s been sabotaged.”

This recognition might be another reason for carefully considering whether to read I Was Told There’d Be Cake in public: Looking up from its pages and into the faces of your fellow New Yorkers—the suit with his Bluetooth earpiece, the iPod-wearing woman singing tunelessly along with Christina Aguilera, the reader laughing his head off over some book—they may begin to look uncomfortably familiar. In fact, they may look at lot like…you.

I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead, $14 paperback) is out now. Crosley reads Apr 17 at McNally Robinson bookstore.