{ "item_title" : "Grief Is for People", "item_author" : [" Sloane Crosley "], "item_description" : "One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly, Paste, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Lit Hub, Real Simple, Nylon, BookPage, The Story Exchange, Sunset, and Zibby Mag Disarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley's memoir explores multiple kinds of loss following the death of her closest friend.How do we live without the ones we love? Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss that is profuse with life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief. For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane's apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place. When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic. Sloane Crosley's search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with resounding empathy. Upending the grief memoir, Grief Is for People is a category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/460/984/0374609845_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "27.00", "online_price" : "23.75", "our_price" : "23.75", "club_price" : "23.75", "savings_pct" : "12", "savings_amt" : "3.25", "club_savings_pct" : "12", "club_savings_amt" : "3.25", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "27.00" } }

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After Sloane Crosley’s apartment is burglarized, she’s unmoored. The thief stole handfuls of jewelry that once belonged to Crosley’s grandmother—a cruel woman whom she didn’t like, Crosley’s mom reminds her. But the jewelry was Crosley’s, and she wants it back. She also wants the sense of safety that fled with the burglar as he exited her bedroom window and descended the fire escape onto Manhattan streets. That isn’t so easy to recover, so instead Crosley channels her uncertainty into detective work. Crosley wrestles with her feelings about the burglary, writing, “Grief is for people, not things.” And on the one-month anniversary of the incident, her grief finds a new object. Her best friend, Russell, dies by suicide. If the burglary unmoored Crosley, Russell’s death sends her out to sea. In her memoir Grief Is for People, Crosley attempts to write her way through the five stages of grief, which provide the book’s structure. Russell’s death trumps Crosley’s missing jewelry, but the two incidents are intertwined in both her psyche and her experience. She and Russell—a former boss from when she worked in book publishing—would spend hours at flea markets in search of treasures. The spice cabinet the jewelry was taken from was one of Russell’s finds, and a missing ring was one of the identifying factors Russell noted on Crosley’s resume during her job interview (“Long brown hair. Square ring”). Crosley’s work is often praised for its humor, whether in her essay collections (I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number) or novels (Cult Classic, The Clasp). But Grief Is for People places at the forefront a remarkable willingness to face the dark questions that follow a suicide. Crosley began writing one month after Russell’s 2019 death in an attempt to convince herself that he was really gone (a conclusion she accepts, inconveniently, during the COVID-19 pandemic). Her search for acceptance is an impulse that readers who have mourned a loved one may recognize—an effort to map a new emotional landscape on what looks, to a non-mourner’s eye, like the same old world.