“What gets old but never ages?” Russell Perreault, the best friend of the novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley, once asked her. The answer to the riddle was jewelry; specifically, the heirloom jewelry Crosley had inherited from her grandmother, the lot of which was stolen from her Manhattan apartment. But Russell’s question also suggested an implicit contrast, which is evoked even more forcefully by the title of the memoir in which he now appears, “Grief Is for People.” Jewelry may pass from hand to hand — and occasionally pass into the hands of intrepid thieves — but it endures. People, those fragile and ephemeral assemblages, do not.
It was June 2019 when Crosley came home from a brief errand to find her bedroom in shambles. She was missing a great deal of “unremarkable loot,” along with two precious pieces: her grandmother’s “amber amulet, the size of an apricot, as well as her green cocktail ring, a dome with tiers of tourmaline.” Despite Crosley’s title, she does grieve these items, though not because she bears any special affection toward the woman who left them to her. “My grandmother was an awful person,” she confesses. “I’ve never met anyone who misses her. She was abusive and creative about it.” Rather, the burglary comes to matter so immensely as “a dark gift of delineation,” an event entwined with the beginning of a much more painful ending.
Advertisement
Just a month after the break-in, when Russell died by suicide at 52, the jewelry became a talisman, a portal to a happier past. In Crosley’s sadness-addled mind, the two losses were linked, the burglary a sickening prelude to the death. She thought to herself, “If I can get these items back, I can get my friend back.” When she has the amulet and ring in hand again, “everything will be just as it used to be.” Her puzzled mother reminded her, “We didn’t like my mother.”
But Crosley persisted and, improbably, succeeded in locating the missing pieces on eBay. A hilarious whirlwind ensued as she tracked the plunder to an address in Brooklyn, considered retaining a private eye but was put off by the prices, shelled out for the ring, and eventually located the amulet in a dodgy establishment in Midtown Manhattan, where she found herself face to face with a man who asked, “Who sent you?” After this display of machismo, however, the man took pity on Crosley and returned the amulet. “What happened to you was not right,” he said.
Her eyes stung with tears because what he said was truer than he knew. What happened to her could never be made right. Her grief, in the end, was for people — and for one person in particular.
What was Russell to Crosley? Most legibly he was her boss: They met when he hired her to work as a publicist at Vintage Books, where he was the executive director of publicity. By the time Crosley quit years later to pursue a full-time writing career, Russell had not graduated to any category that society seemed to recognize as central; in one of the self-help books that Crosley perused in her desperation, she found chapters titled “Loss of a Spouse,” “Loss of a Child,” “Adult Loss of a Parent,” “Adult Loss of a Sibling” and so on. In the support groups she joined online, she felt like an impostor as she chatted with a man whose twin children both died by suicide.
But Crosley’s tie with Russell was undeniable, and she describes it with surprising and winning metaphors. “Ours was the kind of partnership that felt transferable,” she writes. “Give us a designer’s discount and we will decorate your house. Give us some forceps and we will deliver your baby. Give us adjoining desks and we will crack your case.” In short, they were best friends, and “Grief Is for People” is a moving and much-needed tribute to this vital but often unsung human relationship.
If Crosley’s descriptions of love for Russell are often dazzling and unexpected, her meditations on grief are occasionally clichéd. But bromides are par for the course when it comes to bereavement, and this, too, is part of the indignity of loss. “I am disgusted by the universal truths of grief, by the platitudes,” Crosley laments. “I don’t want to make my way through the coming stages, however ill-defined.” Still, she is sympathetic to the self-help guides she reads, and the five chapters of “Grief Is for People” are organized according to the stages of grief, a tacit admission of their usefulness.
Grief may follow a familiar path in every instance, but Russell himself was fiercely original, and Crosley paints a vivid and moving portrait of a singularity — a man who signed up for catalogues using his dogs’ names and wrote Crosley emails from an address he created for her cat. He was sharp, funny, unsentimental and given to light chiding of those he loved. “Why are you dressed like a traffic cone?” he once asked Crosley when she wore a bright orange dress. When she instructed him to extract her from an unwanted conversation at a party, he strode across the room and announced, “I’m sorry to interrupt, I was going to come over here and make up some ridiculous story about why I needed her, but she has to wake up early for an elective surgery and it’s nothing to be ashamed of even at her age — should you be drinking?”
He was a believer in “the souls of objects,” a lifelong collector and an expert haggler at flea markets, but he was also a borderline hoarder who “insisted on keeping old mattresses on the porch” and refused to dispose of a “rusted cocktail shaker,” even when his partner begged him to do so.
Russell’s antics in the office — his pranks, his love of gossip — did not endear him to all of his colleagues. Although he was a gay man, he was accused by a straight female colleague of what Crosley describes as “sexual harassment, basically,” a charge that she concedes has some merit: After all, he once quipped that an editor was “dressed like a flight attendant on Provincetown Airlines” and loudly joked that Crosley was a “toothless hooker” because she declined to get coffee with him. These mordant remarks did not go over well in the rapidly shifting climate of the publishing house. “Russell’s teasing had lost its sugar coating at the exact wrong moment in history,” Crosley writes, “when little infractions got swallowed down the same pipe as big ones, when his boundless energy read as aggression.”
Advertisement
Still, he was “pathologically social and abrasively generous.” Crosley and her colleagues spent countless weekends at his house in Connecticut on a porch “strewn with disemboweled newspapers, overflowing ashtrays, strings of corn silk, plates of half-eaten toast.” At these gatherings, he was wry as ever, but he was also caring, sometimes almost menacingly so. “God help you if he discovered you’d made it three days without asking for an extra towel.”
Above all, Russell was Crosley’s “witness”: Without him, she struggled to believe in her own life.
Crosley’s book is not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life is. By the end of the book, Crosley misses Russell as consumingly as she did on the day of his death. “My grief for you will always remain unruly,” she tells him. There can be no compensation for the ache of it.
Yet “Grief Is for People” is not only or even primarily a sad book. When a woman who could not obtain a job anywhere had an informational interview with Russell, he told her: “You’re not fun. This is a seven-person department. I have to live with you.” “Fun” was Russell’s foremost criterion, and by this metric, Crosley’s book is a roaring success. Reading it, I thought of “Morning,” by Frank O’Hara, a poem not about a death but about a breakup, although the title inevitably evokes the single letter that would make it “mourning.” O’Hara assures the lover who has abandoned him, “I … hold you in my heart/ with a very real/ humor you’d be proud of.” Crosley holds Russell in her heart with humor and humanity, and although she emphasizes that writing is not a consolation or an act of therapy, it is nonetheless a testament. In a way, she recovers Russell not by recovering her stolen jewelry but by gifting him to all of us and preserving him in a more indelible sort of amber. Books, too, get old without aging, at least if they are as abiding as this one is.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Grief Is for People
By Sloane Crosley
MCD. 191 pp. $27
Help for those in crisis:
If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. You can also reach a crisis counselor by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741. Disaster survivors can also reach out to the disaster distress helpline at 800-985-5990.
To support someone going through a mentally tough time: Offer a safe space to talk and listen. Validate and affirm their feelings. Don’t engage in toxic positivity. Don’t be pushy with advice. Ask how you can help. In recent years, depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation have reached historic highs, especially among children and teens. Experts say urgent reforms are needed for America’s underfunded, fragmented and difficult-to-access mental health system.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYml8cX6Oa2poq5ykrq%2BxjJypqKucmsZus9GinJ9lmah6p7vRZqeep6Chsm65xKamoqpdp7K3tcSwZg%3D%3D