I need to preface this review with saying that I am really quite devoted to Sloane Crosley. Sure, I didn’t love The Clasp, but that’s a small percentage of all the words she’s written, and all those other words are insightful, funny and make me think that if I knew her IRL, we’d get along famously. And then I found out she was writing a memoir. About grief. So basically, she was my NBF.

What can I say about Grief is for People without gushing…? There are two threads to Crosley’s story. The main one describes the period following the death of her closest friend, Russell, by suicide.

But the story begins with a different kind of loss – her apartment was burgled and her small, but meaningful collection of jewellery was stolen.

All burglaries are alike, but every burglary is uninsured in its own way.

And Russell is important here because he had a special relationship to ‘stuff’ and understood the significance of the things that were stolen. He was also there to help her deal with the aftermath of the burglary, which ultimately involved tracking down one very distinctive piece (ironically, a real life version of The Clasp) – Crosley’s sleuthing creates another engrossing thread in this memoir.

And then Russell isn’t there.

But there was never going to be a version of the story in which it wasn’t my missing jewelry and my dead friend. You can ignore grief. You push it around your plate. But you can’t give it away.

There are a couple of things that stood out for me. Crosley is honest about Russell and his sometimes abrasive or tricky behaviour, but her honesty is respectful and tender and aching. Interestingly, most of her descriptions of Russell are in the context of their relationship, protecting those involved –

He is my favourite person, the one who somehow sees me both as I want to be seen and as I actually am.

She also says things about grief in a way that I have not heard before and this is the very thing that draws me back to grief memoirs over and over.

And no one is obliged to learn something from loss. This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they’re still in the fetal position.

It’s impossible to predict how much you’ll miss something when it’s gone, to game grief in advance.

The minutes keep coming and I cannot swat them away.

Crosley discusses the particular pain of suicide – the confusion, the questions that will never be answered, the guilt (people either blame themselves for ‘not knowing’ or ‘knowing but not taking action’ – and yet, it is never as clear-cut as this).

When you die by suicide, you die alone. With few exceptions, you die alone. I don’t think people talk about this enough when they talk about suicide, if they talk about it at all. The ending of one’s life is the thing. Taking attendance seems like splitting hairs. But I cannot get over it.

But she also gives significant airtime to the burglary. I think Crosley copped a bit of criticism from some in putting these two losses in the one book. She explains –

…every time I try to separate these losses, to keep the first from contaminating the second, they come back together like magnets. Hideous sisters, they are keeping each other company in the dark.

And this makes perfect sense to me from a text-book bereavement point-of-view. One of the things that shapes how we grieve is our ‘loss history’ – essentially, we have to deal with previous losses (which doesn’t necessarily mean a death), before we can fully process the most current. In other words, people will often find themselves in a situation where someone has just died, and yet they are ‘upset’ by another death that happened years before. Our current losses reactivate our previous losses, and if we haven’t had the opportunity to mourn, it complicates things.

But there are no bereavement groups for stuff. They don’t exist. I’m sorry your house blew up but it was only a house. Grief is for people, not things.

And so, Crosley, weighed down by the disenfranchised grief she feels over the burglary, then catapults headfirst into grieving her dearest friend.

My initial grief, which I thought might be taking a manageable shape, has mutated. It’s colonized my entire personality.

Grief is for People is Crosley at her best – somehow there were parts where I smiled or laughed through my tears. She had me reading passages over and over. She had me laying down the book, so that I could pull myself together and re-calibrate. Her pain is laid bare on every page and it was a privilege to be allowed in.

…hating my heart, so showy in its persistence.

4.5/5