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Library | Shelf Number | Material Type | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Hattiesburg Library | BIO CROSLEY | Book | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: TIME , The Washington Post , Vogue , Vanity Fair , Publishers Weekly , Paste , The Millions , Kirkus Reviews , L it Hub, Real Simple, Nylon, BookPage, The Story Exchange, Sunset, and Zibby Mag
Disarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley's memoir explores multiple kinds of loss following the death of her closest friend.
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.
Author Notes
Sloane Crosley is the author of the novels Cult Classic and The Clasp and of three essay collections: Look Alive Out There and the New York Times bestsellers I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number . She lives in New York City.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this aching meditation on loss and friendship, essayist and novelist Crosley (Cult Classic) eulogizes her late literary mentor and best friend against the backdrop of the high-pressure publishing industry. At 25, Crosley applied for a job opening at Vintage Books. Russell Perreault, the then-37-year-old head of the paperback imprint's publicity department, was charmed and offered her the job. When Crosley, who was hesitant to leave her current position at "a more commercial publishing house," asked for a second interview, Russell shot back, "It's like you've been admitted to Harvard but first you need a tour of the bathrooms." From there, the two became fast friends as they faced down crises both minor and major, including the exposure of James Frey's lies in his fictionalized 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. By the 2010s, however, Russell's light began to dim--Crosley stopped receiving invitations to his country house after his romantic life imploded, and changing workplace norms silenced his signature banter. On June 27, 2019, Crosley's apartment was burglarized; exactly one month later, Russell died by suicide. 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. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME. (Feb.)
Booklist Review
In June 2019, Crosley (Cult Classic, 2022) ran an errand and came home to a burglarized apartment, her jewelry cabinet ransacked. One month later to the hour, her dear friend Russell died by suicide. 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. Crosley's jewelry and Russell had been connected from day one, when she interviewed to work for him in book publicity and he complimented her ring. Working together, a soulmate friendship was born. "Find one of us, pull the string, you'd find the other." After Russell is gone, getting back the stolen pieces seems crucial to somehow keeping him, too. Structuring this memoir around the five stages of grief, Crosley denies. She bargains. She finds herself in a shady third-floor suite in the diamond district with truly shocking results. And she writes, "banging on the walls of this story, trying to find a way in so that I might find a way out." 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.
Table of Contents
| I Don't Let Me Keep You (Denial) | 1 |
| II Object Permanence (Bargaining) | 57 |
| III Kids of All Ages (Anger) | 103 |
| Act 1 Shangri-La | 105 |
| Act 2 Purgatory | 117 |
| Act 3 The Descent | 133 |
| IV Do The Monkeys Miss Us? (Depression) | 147 |
| V The Vertical Earth (Afterward) | 177 |
| Acknowledgments | 193 |