Essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley's Grief Is for People is a bereavement memoir like no other. Heart-wrenching yet witty, it bears a distinctive structure and offers fascinating glimpses into the New York City publishing world.
Crosley's Manhattan apartment was burgled on June 27, 2019--exactly a month before the suicide of her best friend and former boss, Russell, at 52. Throughout the book, the whereabouts of her family jewelry is as much of a mystery as the reason for Russell's death, and investigating the stolen goods in parallel serves as a displacement activity for her. "Grief is for people, not things," she reminds herself, but her grandmother's amber necklace becomes a complex symbol of her synchronous losses. The relationship with Russell had been almost father-daughter in nature. "He is my favorite person, the one who somehow sees me both as I want to be seen and as I actually am," Crosley (Cult Classic) writes. While she was making the uneasy move from a publicist job to full-time writing, Russell was her biggest fan.
Ever the literary stylist, Crosley probes the ironies of her situation, and documents her own choices about framing this story. As earnestly as she searches for clues to Russell's mental state preceding his untimely death, she finds no definitive answers. Her only guess was that he feared "[t]he illness of aging as a gay man. The threat of irrelevance, the loss of power, the expansion of indignities."
This sui generis memoir--sting operation meets stage tragedy--is a bittersweet treasure. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck