Comparisons can be so tiresome. You know, ‘the female David Sedaris’. That sort of thing. Only, they’re kind of irresistible, too. And when Jonathan Lethem makes the Sedaris comparison, too, then at least it’s got a literary pedigree. Sloane Crosley is a twentysomething New Yorker, originally from the nearby suburbs (Westchester), who writes quirky, funny, sometimes poignant pieces about misadventures like accidentally signing on with the boss from hell in her first job in publishing (it’s not having a manuscript thrown at her head that makes Sloane realise she should quit; it’s the way her boss stops talking to her after she misguidedly presents her with a cookie shaped in her likeness).

She writes about being a reluctant bridesmaid in a girly-girl wedding for an almost forgotten high school friend, a passive-aggressive Bridezilla who addresses her friends as ‘ladies’ and changes her surname, along with her husband-to-be, to ‘Universe’. And then there’s the day that, in the midst of moving, she locked herself out of not one, but two apartments. I absolutely love this book and its author. And here’s the icing on the cookie: HBO has just bought the rights, for a TV series that 29-year-old Crosley hopes will ‘have more of a Larry David vibe than a Sex and the City vibe’.