Book Review: ‘Grief Is for People,’ by Sloane Crosley - The New York Times
Length: • 4 mins
Annotated by David Kanigan
Nonfiction
In her new memoir, “Grief Is for People,” Sloane Crosley works through the death of a beloved friend and mentor.
By Ashley C. Ford
Ashley C. Ford is the author of “Somebody’s Daughter.”
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GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE, by Sloane Crosley
Sloane Crosley opens her new book, “Grief Is for People,” with an explanation: “Container first, emotion second.” It’s a four-word guide for the reader: Relieve yourself of the need to understand, and open your mind to the experience of death, suicide and the emotional debris found when you consider the ultimate inevitability.
“Grief Is for People” is Crosley’s eighth book (counting the novel she co-wrote under a pen name and the anthology she edited) and her first memoir. In it, she ties together two losses she suffered in 2019. The first: the theft of a collection of jewelry, including a beloved green cocktail ring that Crosley inherited from her grandmother, which was stolen when Crosley’s home was burglarized one afternoon. Threaded with it is the death of Crosley’s close friend, mentor and former boss, Russell Perreault, who worked for years as the executive director of publicity and social media for Penguin Random House’s Vintage Books imprint. He took his own life just one month after Crosley’s home was broken into, and the close timing of both events intertwines them emotionally for her, ultimately altering the experience of both losses in her memory and hindering her ability to process either.
The memoir is divided into five sections that allude to Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Depression and Afterward (instead of acceptance). In each section, Crosley dissects her memories for missed warning signs, lamenting her inability to predict what, and who, would soon be gone from her life. In the Depression, Anger and Bargaining sections, she anxiously considers if this was the moment that changed everything or maybe it was that one; she wonders if there was a right question she could have asked Perreault, something to say that would have rescued him from his fate.
Perreault was a robust and complicated figure — he was a friend and mentor to Crosley, yes, but, as Crosley recounts, he also faced a series of complaints about his conduct inside the workplace and was confronting a host of other unknowns (to the author and to us). After his death, Crosley wants to know much more about him. She interrogates every interaction from their time together, especially those nearest to the tragedy. She wonders about the lack of invitations to his home in Connecticut, which, it turns out, Perreault had begun filling with more and more objects. (“He wasn’t a hoarder per se, but he was engaging in a land grab for the past, for souvenirs of a more contented time.”)
A vein of tension in Crosley’s memoir is the desire to hold the memory of Perreault close, while trying to anticipate what life will be without him. Without his living voice present, she’s left to sift through old text messages and wonder “where everything I loved has gone and why.”
The book is less than 200 pages, but the weight of suicide as a subject, paired with Crosley’s exceptional ability to write juicy conversation, prevents it from being the kind of slim volume one flies through and forgets. Her signature shrewdness comes through particularly in the Depression section, which shows the author in the depths of her grief, but offers relief through humorous lines of dialogue and passing thoughts on pandemic-era activities. “We were not depressed all the time, no. Sometimes we were drunk.”
Though humor can feel downright medicinal in a time of grief, it has its limits. There are moments when the memoir reveals this, when Crosley is confronted by the reality that a joke is not a sustainable way of processing her pain. Or at least, like most cheap hits of dopamine, its effects degrade over time. In Afterward, she comes to understand this realization could have been Perreault’s ultimate desire for her — maybe he wanted her to know that at some point, you have to face the feral emotion you’ve been locking in a cage and distracting with a funny bone. You have to face your life, and your dead, so that you may live.
Looking into the past to answer thorny questions while mourning may lead us to interesting places, but it won’t lead us to the voices of the dead, just as hunting for lost or taken objects won’t always return them to our hands. Death’s wall of silence is impermeable. Our memories are what we have left, and there’s no amount of remembering that will give us back what we seek. “Time does not heal all wounds,” Crosley writes. “Time does not heal any wounds.” Instead, “time only pushes wounds aside.”
Perreault is gone, as is the world he thrived in, so where does that leave Crosley? Here. Offering us a look into his life through the lens of her love, pain and admiration. Telling us, with precision and generosity, how it might be when it is our turn to remember what was true about those we’ve lost.
GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE | By Sloane Crosley | MCDxFSG | 191 pp. | $27