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."