Sloane Crosley

Disarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley's first memoir explores multiple kinds of loss following the death of her closest friend. Grief Is for People is an unusual kind of grief book--the story of several compounding, unexpected losses, and the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it, but told with the verve and voice we have come to expect from Sloane Crosley. Focusing her trademark humor and wit on the deep pain and confusion of losing her closest friend and mentor to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, searching for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief to understand her new reality. Sloane and Russell worked together and played together, navigating the corridors of office life, the literary world, weekends in the country, and the dramatic ups and downs of making it in New York City. In a city where friends become family, they were best friends. When Russell dies, Sloane is already reeling from a break-in and the theft of her jewelry, her most prized and meaningful possessions. While Russell's death puts that loss in perspective, it also propels her on a quest to right the losses she is feeling, as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic. Crosley's search for answers is frank, funny, and gilded with a deeply resounding empathy. Upending the "grief memoir" in utterly unexpected and entirely welcome ways, Grief Is for People rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of loss during these grief-stricken times.

Grief Is for People

Huiting

Intellectually. I know that if this must be the story of a felony followed by a suicide, it should have separate entrances: one for the fly and one for the elephant. This is certainly how it will be in the future. Perspective will be painful but effortless. One day there will be only Russell and, on occasion, I’ll tell the story for long enough, a burglary that happened "around the same time." But we are so far from the future.

Then l'd run out of my nightly stipend of memories and lie there in silence, wishing I could graft some of that silence onto those evenings when Russell and I walked home along the park, competing for airtime. What words would have flooded in if we'd let them? In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion writes: A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty" Also true: The whole world is empty, and a single person is missing for you.

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