Grief Is For People by Sloane Crowley

Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosley

208 pages

Published February 2024 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publisher's Summary: 

How do we live without the ones we love? Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss that is profuse with life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.

For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.

When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic.

Sloane Crosley’s search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is a category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.

My Thoughts: 

"Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell, and people like me now, we don't know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won't judge or abandon u, holding on to the past in this tangible way. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight." 

Do we, though? Don't we all really love our "stuff," especially the things that tie us to another person? When Crosley's apartment was broken into and all of her jewelry stolen, the thief stole not just some jewelry, but pieces that tied her to her grandmother (although that was a complicated relationship, to say the least) and to Russell (one of the first things he noticed about her was her jewelry). Even the chest she kept her jewelry in was an antique that Russell had talked her into buying. 

People she knew didn't seem to understand the depth of the pain Crosley experienced with the loss; perhaps that's the experience of a city of people who live with a certain element of crime to which they've become accustomed. But I felt like I understood the pain Crosley experienced with the break in. She had not only lost her belongings, but her sense of safety and, by the way they handled the break in, her sense of comfort in the police. 

Exactly a month later, her best friend committed died. Russell didn't just die; he committed suicide. She'd lost her friend and was left wondering what she had missed and what she might have been able to do if she'd noticed the signs. And then came the pandemic. 

I wouldn't say I loved this book; but I did appreciate Crosley's writing and it left me with some things to think about. 

"Anger is a cousin of intelligence. If you are not revolted by certain things, you have no boundaries. If you have no boundaries, you have no self-knowledge. If you have no self-knowledge, you have no taste, and if you have no taste, why are you here? Russell taught me that. He taught me to be selective about who I jumped for and how high."

Life: It Goes On - November 17

Happy Sunday! We have had so many grey, overcast days of late - I'm so happy to be sitting at the windows with the sun shining in this morning. I'm hoping it lasts so I can enjoy being outside for a while today. 

Ever had one of those "quick" tasks that turn into an hours long battle? Yesterday I was going to put another leaf into the dining room table, in preparation for Thanksgiving, only to discover that I couldn't get the table open wide enough. Called in Big Guy. No luck. Flipped the table over (no easy feat!) to see if we could figure out what the problem was, which caused me to decide that I needed to clean the bottom of the table. We kept trying things then walking away in frustration. Finally got it to slide open, hours after we started. And this is how whole days get away from me! 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: Charles Frazier's The Trackers (loved it!) and started Gregory Maguire's Wicked, before I go to see the movie. I have it on my Nook, but knew I wasn't going to get it read in time so I bought it from Chirp, not knowing that you can only listen to books you buy from them on their app. Fine, whatever. Except that this morning, when I pulled it up to listen, it had lost my progress and started from the beginning. Ugh! 

New sunglasses - how fun 
are these?! 

Watched: Nothing unusual. What we didn't watch was the news. 

Read: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes for book club Tuesday. 

Made: Cinnamon monkey bread and a version of lasagna so I could use up some things in the fridge and freezer. This week has continued to be about getting things used out of the freezer so that there's been room for the food for Thanksgiving week. 

Enjoyed: Dinner and some shopping with friends last night. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: On painting our back hall and doing touch up painting throughout the house, having the carpets cleaned, and hanging some new curtains. Who wants to come for Christmas so I have an incentive to keep knocking out projects I've been meaning to get to for a long time?! 

Thinking About: Final meal plans for next week, what serving pieces I will need, what needs to be done in the guest rooms before guests begin arriving, what cleaning still needs to be done. My brain is an even crazier place than usual these days! 

Feeling: So excited...and a little disappointed. My kiddos arrive in eight days! Unfortunately, it looks like Ms. S may not be able to come so we won't all be together, after all. 

Looking forward to: Book club this week. 

Question of the week: I keep hearing about people who can have their house ready for company with ten minutes warning. Are you one of those people? If not (and you're like me), what things do you try to get done in that ten minutes to make as much impact as you possibly can? 

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Read by Jessie Buckley

9 hours, 40 minutes

Published May 2024 by Scribner

Publisher's Summary: 

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at work an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis's doorstep. It is what Eilis does-and what she refuses to do-in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín's novel so riveting and suspenseful.

My Thoughts: 

I was first introduced to Colm Toibin when I read his book, Brooklyn, and it was there that readers first met Eilis Lacey and Tony Fiorello. I looked back at my review to that book to see if my feelings now about that book mirrored what I'd felt about it when I first finished reading it. They did. But I found something interesting in that review. I remarked that: Time moves at quite a pace in Brooklyn; Toibin bypasses long periods of time between episode and vignettes. Here, it felt very much the opposite. This is not a book that spans years, but rather weeks. But things also remain very much the same: Nothing showy or lush about Brooklyn. All of the emotion is just under the surface and yet it is palpable and the characters are believable and realistic. 

What would you do if you found yourself in Eilis' position? She has told Tony she will, under no circumstances, raise his child by another woman and she does not want it raised in the family. Unable to get confirmation from Tony that she won't have to see the child, she leaves for Ireland, ostensibly for her mother's upcoming 80th birthday. Although she hasn't been home in decades, there's a part of Eilis that longs for the place where she most comfortable; it certainly isn't on Long Island, surrounded by her Tony's extended Italian family where she still feels like something of an outsider. 

All of that contributes to what happens in Ireland when Eilis is encounters Jim, the man she fell in love with when she was last in Ireland and whom she left behind to return to Tony (who she was already secretly married to). Once again Eilis is torn between the settled life she has and the dream of a deep love she finds in Ireland. What might happen between Eilis and Jim is complicated by the fact that Jim is already engaged to one of Eilis' old friends and the arrival of Eilis' children, who have never met their Irish grandmother. 

There are a lot of twists and turns to this one and it is, to a great extent less about Eilis than was Brooklyn. Still, I enjoyed getting to know Jim and Nancy better and to get an even better look at Eilis' relationship with her mother. We spend a lot of time wondering if Eilis will, once again, return to Tony or will, this time, stay in Ireland. Still trying to process how I feel about the end of the book and if you look at other reviews, you'll find I'm not alone. 

I very much liked that Nora Webster (of Toibin's title by the same name) appears in this book, as Eilis' mother did in that book. Jessie Buckley's reading of Long Island is spectacular. I highly recommend listening to this one. Like Brooklyn, this one would make a good book club selection, as there is a lot to process here. It's appearing on "Best of 2024" lists, although, to be honest, I'm not sure it will make mine. I'm sure that has more to do with me than others giving Toibin the accolades he deserves for his body of work. 

Mini-reviews: The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson and Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

Read by Fiona Hardingham

15 hours, 20 minutes

Published May 2024 by Random House Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: It is the summer of 1919 and Constance Haverhill is without prospects. Now that all the men have returned from the front, she has been asked to give up her cottage and her job at the estate she helped run during the war. While she looks for a position as a bookkeeper or—horror—a governess, she’s sent as a lady’s companion to an old family friend who is convalescing at a seaside hotel. Despite having only weeks to find a permanent home, Constance is swept up in the social whirl of Hazelbourne-on-Sea after she rescues the local baronet’s daughter, Poppy Wirrall, from a social faux pas.

Poppy wears trousers, operates a taxi and delivery service to employ local women, and runs a ladies’ motorcycle club (to which she plans to add flying lessons). She and her friends enthusiastically welcome Constance into their circle. And then there is Harris, Poppy’s recalcitrant but handsome brother—a fighter pilot recently wounded in battle—who warms in Constance’s presence. But things are more complicated than they seem in this sunny pocket of English high society. As the country prepares to celebrate its hard-won peace, Constance and the women of the club are forced to confront the fact that the freedoms they gained during the war are being revoked.

My Thoughts: 

Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand was one of my favorite books the year I read it. One of the things I liked about that book was the way Simonson dealt with racism and classism in England. She touches on that same topics here and I would very much have liked to see more of that. Instead, Simonson tried to work in a lot of different themes, including, of course, women's rights, domestic abuse, and the effects of war on those involved and those at home. It felt, to me, like a bit too much and sometimes felt like Simonson wasn't sure which theme she really wanted most to emphasize. 

I did like a lot of the characters and the setting; but I'm still not, weeks after finishing the book, sure if I liked the ending. One thing I really didn't like was the reading (sorry, Ms. Hardingham) - some of the female voices really grated on my nerves. It's a nice time capsule of a place in time and would probably give book clubs a lot to talk about. 

Learned By Heart by Emma Donoghue 

Read by Shiromi Arserio

8 hours, 50 minutes

Published August 2023 by Little, Brown and Company

Publisher's Summary: Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.

My Thoughts: 

As with most (if not all?) of Donoghue's books, this one is based on real people. I first became aware of Anne Lister when I watched Gentleman Jack on HBO. Lister was dubbed the "first modern lesbian" and is well known because of the diaries she left behind, which included the story of her relationship with Eliza Raine, a young woman with a British father and Indian mother who was orphaned and sent to an English boarding school, where she met and fell in love with Lister. As tough as it is to be a gay young person in these times, imagine what it was like for young people in the early 1800's. 

The book is made up of third party narratives the girls' school days together and letters from Raine to Lister as an adult. Raine is a patient at an asylum and we slowly realize, as the book goes on, that she is much more disturbed that we at first realize. Much emphasis in placed on the other girls at the school, perhaps to emphasize how quickly Lister was able to ingratiate herself with them, despite being a rebel, and how much Raine's  dark skin kept her separated from the others. The book picked up for me in the end, as Raine's writing became prevalent. Interesting, but not my favorite of Donoghue's works.