WHEN you’ve made your name as one of the funniest writers of your generation—twice a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor—you develop the skills to reliably spin life’s little disasters into sentences that snap. Over three essay collections, two novels, and seemingly countless magazine pieces and newspaper columns, Sloane Crosley has built a career finding the humor in everything from emotionally unavailable boyfriends and horrifying medical experiences to spending way too much money reclaiming her domain name from a sleazy e-squatter. All of which is to say, Crosley’s previous work provides a master class in kvetching as an art form. Her tool kit: a sharp eye plus a ready wit along with the perfect words.
But the summer of 2019 delivered a real tragedy, not the kind of thing Crosley could spin into a wry confection of spot-on observational humor. When her dear friend Russell Perreault died by suicide at age fifty-two, Crosley was already taking notes for what she thought would be an essay about having been robbed exactly one month earlier. The thief had broken into her Manhattan apartment, stealing her jewelry and damaging an antique Dutch ceramic spice cabinet that Perreault had convinced her to buy at a flea market. “I used to tease Russell about anthropomorphizing clocks and lamps, for treating the flea market like his personal orphanage,” Crosley writes in her new book, Grief Is for People, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February. “He believed in the souls of objects.”
The book’s title comes from a line in its first section, in which Crosley is still reckoning with her sense of loss over the jewelry: “Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell and people like me now, we don’t know where sadness belongs.”
Their friendship began at work, when Crosley interviewed for a job in the publicity department at Vintage Books. She had already been handpicked for a role many would envy, but she asked for a second interview to make sure she would like working there. “It. They would be colleagues for the next decade.
