Sloane Crosley’s writing sparkles with a remarkable wit. Through three essay collections and two novels, she’s chronicled not only her personal follies, foibles, and exploits, but those of her friends, family, fellow New Yorkers, and fictional creations through observations that are often as trenchant or candid as they are hilarious.
Her latest book, “Grief Is for People,” forgoes this familiar formula, not out of some mid-best-selling-career recalibration, but in service of its grievous subject matter. Part memoir, part commemoration, the book tracks Crosley’s efforts to come to terms with both the death of her best friend and the loss of what he represented, namely an industry and an era that were formative for her. “Grief Is for People” is not without amusing episodes — I don’t know that someone as funny as Crosley appears on the page could abandon humor entirely — but overall the book is more bold, probing, and exposed than anything else she has published.
In 2002, when she is 25, Crosley is hired by Russell Perreault, in the publicity department at Vintage Books, the paperback division of Knopf. Russell, whose last name never appears in “Grief,” becomes Crosley’s mentor — an “excellent [one] so long as you didn’t expect patience,” and the two become each other’s closest confidants. During their first years working together, Russell is a “puckish breeze blowing through some pretty self-serious trees.” When Crosley quits to write full time in December 2010, both Russell and publishing have changed. He is “stymied, scared, self-censuring, scrambling for relevance.” The book business is starting to confront, among other forces, “the ruinous interferences of technology.” Over the next nine years, their emotional closeness remains, though their physical proximity wanes. Then on July 27, 2019, exactly one month after Crosley’s West Village apartment is burglarized, Russell dies by suicide.
The book, organized in chapters titled with and loosely tied to Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, is largely chronological, starting with the break-in and continuing through the pandemic. The early scenes concerning the robbery, which results in the loss of 41 pieces of jewelry, could feature in any of Crosley’s prior collections. The NYPD can’t be bothered, so she does her own sleuthing, which is characteristically courageous, potentially foolish, and thoroughly entertaining.
With Russell’s death, her focus subtly shifts until the robbery fades from the pages entirely, the theft becoming “a dark gift of delineation” between the relative lightness of losses past and the often unbearable burden of those that ensue. In a couple of months, Crosley writes that grief “has colonized my entire personality. Any word that comes out of my mouth that is not Russell’s name is a lie. The missing is so constant, even I am surprised by it.” She seeks guidance in self-help books; empathy in grief groups; and culpability in signs that she must have missed.
It feels almost inconsiderate to parse such a raw and forthcoming exploration of emotion, but the book’s middle act, a gently wistful evocation of a halcyon era of work and play coincident with Crosley’s years at Vintage, merits spotlighting. For her and her friends, a key part of those years was spending summers and weekends at the Connecticut home of Russell and his partner. “From 2002 to 2010, we lived in a Terrence McNally play by way of MetroNorth.” The house, chockablock with Russell’s flea market treasures, provides “an escape from New York at an age when we didn’t really need it. […] we didn’t have actual problems. Not yet.”
Problems eventually arrive, and then cascade. Russell, and Crosley, are repping James Frey when “A Million Little Pieces” gains notoriety in 2006. After Crosley leaves Vintage, workplace allegations — mostly specious — are lobbed at Russell, whose “teasing had lost its sugar coating at the exact wrong moment in history, when little infractions got swallowed down the same pipe as the big ones, when his boundless energy read as aggression.” And in the present day, as Crosley writes and grieves, the pandemic arrives. The story wavers a bit, but largely because no matter how perceptive Crosley is, drawing localized lessons about a time inextricably tied to the ongoing crisis of our national democratic experiment still feels premature.
Unremarked upon in the book is the fact that during the seven months following Russell’s death, Crosley was finishing writing her novel “Cult Classic,” which would be published in 2022. While there are glaring differences, the relationship between Lola, the novel’s narrator, and Clive, her mentor and former boss, seems to reflect early efforts to tentatively address Russell’s death, efforts perhaps eased by speaking from behind the scrim of fiction. Numerous lines from the novel could come straight from the pages of “Grief,” and both books end with the narrator speaking directly to the dead.
A photojournalist I once worked with believed that, no matter his situation or unease, his camera provided “infinite license” to take the shot he needed. Rereading “Cult Classic” now feels like watching Crosley work partly from behind her camera, whereas “Grief Is for People” feels like she is staring directly at the reader, unshielded and unprotected. Crosley writes that Russell “understood that real literature, like love, comes from a desire to be known.” With this latest work, she demonstrates that the converse is also true: By attesting to her pain so publicly and poignantly, Crosley again shows her noteworthy literary chops, as well as her unambiguous love for all that’s been lost.
GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE
By Sloane Crosley
MCD, 208 pp., $27
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.