I rarely give memoirs less than 5 stars because I truly respect author's telling their stories. Grief is for People focuses on Sloane Crosley's loss of one of her close friends, Richard, to suicide.

For me, I found the writing hard to follow. The timeline jumps around without clear transitions which made it a little confusing. Besides the writing, I found the book to be too long By the middle of the book, I had lost interest as it felt a bit repetitive.

A big thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Staus, and Giroux for an advanced copy of this memoir in exchange for my honest review. It will be published on March 27th, 2024.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG for the ARC!

I adored this! Any book on grief is inherently an exercise in failure, and the best it can do is fail meaningfully. Sloane Crosley essentially builds "Grief is for People" around this understanding, and the result is a heart-rending exploration of loss.

Rather than playing into the trope of death as earth-shattering devastation, Crosley concentrates on the way it serrates the margins of life, noting experiences like someone “multitasking a condolence call” in the wake of her loss. Grief might be a universal experience, but nobody knows how to handle it, and to pretend otherwise would be disingenuous.

Likewise, this attention to the “smallness” of loss influences the book’s framing device—Crosley’s desperate attempts to reclaim stolen jewelry. This approach prevents the book from succumbing to any clichés about the five stages of grief or lessons learned through loss. Instead, it creates space to explore the way our distractions take on new meaning when we are emotionally unmoored.

Crosley’s depiction of the central relationship is among the best examinations of platonic intimacy I have ever read. Russell—her deceased friend—is given the dignity of being a complicated and wonderful and often sort of horrible person. Many books of this ilk tend to deify or romanticize the dead, but "Grief is for People" is all the more beautiful because it refuses to do so. There’s tenderness here because Crosley’s love treats him as a whole person. She never sugarcoats his behavior, but she is compassionate about why he behaved the way he did. Furthermore, her honesty allows her to reflect fully on suicide and its relational implications. There’s anger, confusion, understanding, and grace in how she writes about the subject.

Joan Didion is referenced several times throughout, and this book feels like a spiritual successor to her work in many ways. If you enjoy "The Year of Magical Thinking," this builds on those sensibilities in a way that resonates more in the 2020s. The tone is warm and funny without the kind of biting cynicism we often see in books like this. If there are any critiques to be made, they are reflective of the genre more than the book itself. As the final third of the memoir shifts into Crosley’s experience during COVID, the razor-sharp focus is replaced—albeit briefly—by a kind of ambling uncertainty. Whereas most of the book interrogates the impossibility of narrative in loss, this section seems to resist it a bit. It does not weaken the book in any substantial way, but there are maybe 20-30 pages that feel inconsequential.

Overall, though, this is one of my favorite memoirs in quite a while, and it made me want to go back and read the author’s other books.

This book rang every bell for me. As a widow for 4 years and having lost my mumma 2 1/2 years ago, now having a manageable but incurable genetic illness, grief rules my life. This book was funny yet incredibly sad. Poignant yet unbelievably raw. I could relate to the grief aspect throughout. Well written.

In Grief is for People, Sloane Crosley begins to conflate the death of her best friend with the theft of her grandmother's jewelry. Crosley's experience is firmly rooted within reality, while managing to diverge from it. It feels like Crosley is coming to terms with her friend's death in realtime. It is a deep meditation on friendship, loss, and how well we really know the people in our lives. It is a tribute to her friend, considering his death by suicide with grace and kindness, while also considering his faults. It's a sad and heartfelt book--a beautifully written, relatable, sincere, and realistic portrait of loss.

Sloane Crosley is one of my favorite writers, so I was thrilled to get an e-galley of her latest, even though I knew that the topic, grief, would be difficult for me. And the fact that it's grief for a death by suicide is going to be tough for some folks, but this book is worth it. The author contrasts the grief over lost things (all her jewelry was taken in a home invasion robbery) to the loss of her best friend a month later, and there are so many relatable moments in her meditations on each. I highlighted a lot, but this one stuck with me:

"Alas, as the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg wrote, 'You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing. You cannot deceive yourself by hoping for caresses and lullabies from your vocation.' What you *can* do is be careful with other people. Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse--delicate things made out of solid materials."

And one more:
"We all have something we're trying to fend off. The question is how big and with what?"

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a temporary digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

A beautiful written and reflective memoir that blends Sloane Crosley's signature sense of humor with crushing sadness as she reflects on a robbery in her own apartment and the suicide of her close friend and mentor. Highly recommend for those looking for a thoughtful read about how unfathomable loss can be, and how to live with it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

I really like Sloane Crosley's writing, so I was thrilled to get a chance to read her latest collection of essays. Crosley has a break in at her apartment and her jewelry stolen a month before her best friend dies. She processes her grief and loss over both things over the course of this book.

It started strong for me, but then felt really long and repetitive. Grief is long, so may be that was the point. I think this could have worked better as an article vs a full book. Strong writing throughout.

Thank you for the advanced reader copy Netgalley & Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD.

Tense, visceral, and completely gripping.

I was especially enthralled during the first half when we learn about Sloane’s relationship with Russell and witness Sloane’s determination to find out who stole her jewelry and how she could possibly get it back. This was my first read by this author and I enjoyed her writing style and storytelling abilities - she infuses humor into this deeply sad yet celebratory account of her friendship with Russell.

Thank you very much to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

grief is for people, crosley’s first memoir, is the story of the loss of her close friend and former boss, as well as the burglary of her apt that happened the month prior to the death. crosley starts the memoir discussing the theme of loss, the loss of her jewelry from her home and her space, but really this event is a precursor to the tragedy of losing someone so close to you.

i respect crosley so much for releasing this memoir on a public stage to be reviewed and read by the public. this memoir describes the simple moments of grief, such as avoiding a place you visited with that person, to the bigger sensations of not knowing how you can move on after these losses.

as a huge memoir fan in general, this one is truly a gem and i recommend it to everyone.

overall: 4⭐️

I've never read a book on grief that made me feel like someone else had a relationship with grief that comes close to mine, but Sloane Crosley's new book made me feel seen -- uncomfortably so at times, but seen nevertheless. I had to put the book aside multiple times during my reading to cry, wondering how some pixels on a screen could so effectively reactivate my feelings and remind me what it feels like when the grief is fresh, what it feels like to be trying to process the feelings while not wanting to process the feelings because processing them means my person is really gone. It's a beautiful, painful book, and I'll be getting a physical copy ASAP for my personal library.

This is the third Sloane Crosley book I've read--also my first non-fiction and my favorite of the bunch. With the others, I liked the concept/early pages but didn't feel like they fully coalesced. This one does.

Crosley loses her jewelry to a robbery, best friend to suicide, and life as she knows it to the pandemic in less than a year. The grief piles up. It's not linear or even logical.

The suicide of a loved one can make you feel powerless. If there was anything you could have done (there wasn't), that time is past. Crosley pours her grief into a monomaniacal search for her stolen family heirlooms that her late friend so admired, feeling like it will bring part of him back but knowing it won't. Suicides make detectives of everyone left in their wake. Were there hints? A cry for help that I missed?

Grieving is a selfish act--you cannot be fully present for others when you are so fully focused on just surviving another day with an insurmountable weight on your back. "Time does not heal all wounds. Time does not heal any wounds," Crosley writes, "Time only pushes wounds aside. Regular life becomes insistent and crowds out the loss." But when the losses compound and the world stops spinning as everyone huddles indoors to ward off a deadly virus, there is no escaping the suffocation of mourning.

A sad but witty book about theft and grief. Poor Crosley really went through it! I don't often see books about mourning a friend so it appealed to me. For many people friends are closer than relatives and grief is so complicated. The only issue i had was that her friend seemed to be rather unpleasant and complaints were made against him about his behavior (?) and that seemed a little glossed over. I would have liked more about what it was like being friends with a complicated man in that aspect.

For some reason, unbeknownst to me, I always find myself gravitating towards books that deal with grief.

It might be because grief, in its purest form, is deeply personal. When you’re in it, it feels like a thing that can’t be shared with others. At some points you think that sharing your grief would somehow lessen the importance of the thing you’re grieving. You feel alone in it, and sometimes that’s exactly what you want to feel. What you need to feel.

Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley is a vivid, raw portrayal of grief. It dissects those unreasonable, yet very real, feelings you have when someone close to you dies. In line with the theme, she quotes Didion a few times throughout the book. And I couldn’t help but notice the influence of Didion’s style in Crosley’s words. It’s that detached, yet ever so emotional and introspective prose, with quotes so precise that you won’t forget them any time soon. It’s brilliant.

As Sloane writes about the events surrounding her friend’s suicide, she weaves in bits from a burglary that happened to her exactly one month before her friend died. Due to their proximity in time, and her mind being clouded by grief, these events become interconnected for her. We see her trying, and failing, to find proof of her friend still being kept alive in the world. We see her pulling at the last bits of memory she has of her friend, trying to find a reason. An explanation as to why he left her in the world all alone.

This memoir was paradoxically sad and hilarious at the same time. It’s a story that gripped me right from the beginning, and I know I will be thinking about it for days to come. Thank you so much to FSG for the ARC.

Grief is for People is indeed a remarkable contribution to the side of the living. Crosley's memoir focuses on two personal tragedies, reflecting on the loss of her best friend Russell to suicide through the lens of a personal home invasion in which family jewelry was stolen. The memoir itself is a detective story - what seems to be a hunt for lost jewelry is ultimately a search for meaning. 

Crosley is an immensely talented writer. Even though it's clear her Russell and I would not be friends, I missed him in the way she missed him. I felt nervous and unsettled when she described the insecurity following the burglary. The brilliance of drawing together these two tragedies (with an additional focus on the pandemic towards the end of the book) make it read more like well-developed fiction. 

Despite the memoir's overarching theme of suicide, I laughed out loud more times than I remember. Crosley's sharp wit and approachable style make this an excellent memoir for anyone interested in loss, grief, or a search for meaning more broadly. 

4.5 stars.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

What a heartbreaking book, in an incredibly poignant, reflective way. Sloane Crosley is a former book publicist turned author so obviously the writing is exquisite and emotional as she writes about the unexpected suicide of her best friend juxtaposed with a theft in her apartment a month prior and the pandemic that would start six months after his death. Crosley covers the typical topics that we see from those close to someone who has died by suicide - should I have seen this coming, what might I have done differently to prevent this, etc. - but also reflects on her relationship with Russell. She explores connection, both with friends like Russell, and with objects that carry some sense of history with them, like some of the items stolen from her apartment. We as a society don’t talk about grief enough, and I really appreciate this beautiful and vulnerable entry into the conversation.

I’ve always really liked Sloane Crosley’s writing and this book is no exception to that. When people are able to articulate their own grief, I find myself better to understand my own losses. By some miracle (and without processing the connection), I read this immediately after Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and I’m very glad I did. Crosley does a great job exploring the loss of her personal possessions and her dear friend while trying to find the meaning behind all of it. Highly recommend for fans of Crosley’s other books and those looking to dive further into their own understanding of grief.

This memoir is wonderful. I read this so quickly as Crosley’s writing is so immersive and witty I didn’t want to put it down. Dealing with such a hefty topic of suicide in the most raw and compassionate way, I will definitely return to this book again and again.

As someone who rarely takes notes, underlines, or scribbles in the margins while reading, it is truly a testament to this book how much of it I ended up highlighting. So many passages and even sentences just stopped me in my tracks and had me reading them over and over again.

It feels almost impossible to weigh in on writing like this that is so raw and personal, but this book completely bowled me over and I will be thinking about it for a long time. I am such a fan of Crosley’s writing and her signature wit remains while she deftly recounts a time in her life that was marked by such devastating grief. I am honestly just so thankful that I was able to read this and find some comfort in how one can begin to deal with this specifically tragic and complicated type of loss.

I can’t recommend this highly enough.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Since reading I Was Told There’d Be Cake and Cult Classic and loving both, Sloane Crosley has become an author I will always keep an eye out for. Her memoir Grief Is For People is no exception to this pattern of great writing, holding off a bit on her humor centric style and exploring the vulnerability of losing her good friend and coworker to suicide and being robbed shortly after. Crosley still tastefully blends her humor that made me love IWTTBC into this at many points making it a great read.
Highly recommend for fans of Calypso - David Sedaris and The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion.
Big thank you to NetGalley and FSG/MCD for the e-ARC!

Crosley's first memoir shows the author lost in grief after the suicide of her best friend and former colleague, Russell Perreault, who hanged himself in 2019. The book's strength is also its weakness: Crosley depicts the process of coming to terms with what happened as messy, fragmentary, mysterious, and thus: realistically from a psychological standpoint, but it diminishes the essayistic force when mundane scenes that suddenly acquire meaning and random connections the mind makes under such pressure get the same (and frequently more) weight than the parts that are interesting on the factual level.

The book rests and emotional movements, and it does so intentionally, and the text is just as much about Crosley as about Perreault, also intentionally. But I wanted to hear more about Perreault's backstory and his possible motivations. I only briefly learnt how he, as a gay man, fled to NYC to live freely, how he did tend to not supplment, but replace his life with performance art, and, most interestingly, how he received regular complaints for his behavior at work because he was stuck in the old world where harsh, inappropriate words from older men were just accepted. I was wondering: How did Crosley feel about it, did they talk about it? Of course there can't be one definite answer as to why a person ends their life, but the neuralgic points remained too murky for me. I also loved the little bits and pieces about the publishing world, like the scandal around A Million Little Pieces, and I wanted more.

Still, Crosley remains a great writer, and it's intruguing to witness her trying to capture the unspeakable. The title hints at the fact that with a person, a whole world disappears, also a world of things, routines, events. There are many smart little throways there, relating to the power of anger, for instance, or the existential loneliness that becomes graspable when you realize you can't fully know a person. I wished the text made more of it potential though.