AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Is it wrong to say that a memoir about loss and grieving is fun to read? If so, I’m in trouble, because I enjoyed every word of this book. I also ached and suffered along with Crosley: Her portrait of mourning after the suicide of her best friend is gutting and deeply engaging.
—Susan Orlean
Potent and propulsive, a lyrical meditation on loss and what comes after. Grief Is for People is heartbreaking and wholly original.
—Tara Westover
Grief Is for People captures the feeling of watching a beloved, inappropriate and wild person fit less and less with the times we live in. Like Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking or Defoe's Journal of A Plague Year, Grief Is for People takes us through the ordinary, awful and never-quite-ending experience of loss. It also made me laugh very hard, many times. I can't stop thinking about it.
—John Mulaney
I have come to rely on Sloane Crosley for her oyster knife humor, bourbon hot observation, and indelible portraits of how we live with each other in this constantly shifting world. Grief Is For People is about how we live without the ones we love. Crosley brings her whole self to this memoir—her gifts, her flaws, her intellect, and emotion. She loves hard, grieves hard, and writes with the beauty and urgency of a white hot star. I wish I didn’t “get” this book as much as I do. What a gift that she kept her wit intact through all-consuming loss. Grief Is for People is the book I didn’t know I needed to read.
—Tayari Jones
I can't imagine a better companion to guide us through the pain of losing a friend. Crosley's prose is honest, lucid, and always surprising. Grief Is for People is vivid and bitingly funny and yet delicately unfurls the magical thinking and murk that follow a friend's suicide. A necessary book; I will be keeping it close for years to come.
—Meghan O’Rourke
An indelible portrait of a singular friendship, Grief Is for People is a beautifully written and sharply observed memoir about grief, yes, but also: secrets, betrayal, rage, work, community, and most of all, love. It's both a provocation and a balm to the soul.
—Dani Shapiro
Grief can feel like falling off a tall cliff in slow motion. Sloane Crosley maps her descent through grief’s anguish and disbelief with such intelligence, humor, and unvarnished honesty that we never want to hit the ground. It’s a testament to Crosley’s enormous talent that she could transform such a terrible loss into a story that becomes more satisfying with each page: a celebration of our deepest connections, a manifestation of real love.
—Heather Havrilesky
[An] aching meditation on loss and friendship…Crosley elegantly links the two losses by explaining how her fevered desire to reclaim her burglarized items stood in for her inability to reclaim Russell. Her characteristically whip-smart prose takes on a newly introspective quality as she reinvigorates dusty publishing memoir tropes and captures the minutiae of a complicated friendship with humor and heart. This is a must-read. —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Crosley’s memoir is not only a joy to read, but also a respectful and philosophical work about a colleague’s recent suicide. [Her] friend Russell Perreault …loved “cheap trinkets” from flea markets, had “the timeless charm of a movie star, the competitive edge of a Spartan,” and—one of many marvelous details—a “thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, seemingly scalped from the roof of an English country house.”…Crosley fashions a sharp narrative [and] the result is a warm remembrance sure to resonate with anyone who has experienced loss. A marvelously tender memoir on suicide and loss.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Novelist and essayist Crosley is a tightrope writer of devastating wit and plain devastation, a balancing act no doubt requiring even more muscle in this memoir of her grief…Also a story of the shifting sands of the last two decades in book publishing and the author's and her friend's changing places within it, this is a searching, impassioned, cathartic, and loving elegy.” —Booklist (starred review)
ABOUT:
Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship and a book about loss packed with verve for 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 friends, 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, while Russell is still alive, 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 her on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic. Crosley’s search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with a resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is the 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.