The Drawers Keep Popping Open: On Sloane Crosley’s “Grief Is for People”

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley “I CAN’T SEEM to find a moment alone with you.” These despairing words appear in a passage close to the end of Sloane Crosley’s latest book, Grief Is for People (2024). The memoir traces the best-selling essayist and novelist’s response to learning that her dear friend Russell Perreault, who also happened to be her former boss and mentor, died by suicide. Crosley’s feelings and actions in the wake of the event, which occurred when she was on the cusp of turning 41 in the summer of 2019, are the focus of this tightly woven and sophisticated entrée into the genre of grief memoir. The word “friend” has myriad connotations and context-dependent uses. Crosley notes from the get-go that it will be difficult to describe the relationship she shared with this person who meant so much to her. Still, she sets out to try and make the impress of their connection known. Accordingly, she examines both the time she shared with Perreault and the aftermath of his sudden death. The author divides her memoir into sections tracking four of the five commonly employed, although often contested, “stages of grief” popularized by the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. In lieu of the final stage, “acceptance”—which, following Freud, is generally associated with a kind of letting go—Crosley simply inserts an “afterward.” In other words, she remains heartbroken. At the same time, she has come to understand the “constant ache” left by her friend’s absence as a newfound part of her, a mood or mode she can tune into or draw upon as needed. ¤ When Perreault died, Crosley was an established writer living alone in a small apartment in the West Village. The two met 15 years earlier, when Perreault hired her to work in his publicity department at Vintage Books, a prestigious imprint of Knopf Doubleday. At the time, she was 25 years old. He was 37. As Crosley tells it, Perreault’s larger-than-life personality dominated the office. She at once characterizes her former boss as a “frank” personality and […]

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