Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

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? After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Sloane 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 death 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, wickedly funny, and gilded with resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is a story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A contemporary elegy, it rises to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.

Why I Picked It Up

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I’ve been big on essay collections and short stories in 2025. I’m not entirely sure why. A newfound appreciation, a curiosity about craft and versatility among some of the greats, and a fractured attention span? (If I’m being honest, as I also prefer TV episodes to movies nowadays because I’m one of those.)

A grief memoir is hit or miss for me, as is a lot of litfic (of course, so says the label, etc.) For example, Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye is one of my absolute favorites but I cannot stand Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. As Crosley herself says when discussing the slew of self-help titles people recommended to her throughout the loss of her best friend: each book is very different but also startlingly the same. People don’t connect to them unilaterally.

About the Book

First: the voice. I personally loved Crosley’s voice, and connection to it will probably depend on your sense of humor and your preferences in regards to scaffolding. She opens the book discussing the first catalyst of life events that started to feel poetic, that shaped the sense of meaning surrounding her year-plus of grief: her apartment being burglarized and her mission to get her heirloom jewelry back, which had little to do with the cost or sentimental attachment (mean grandma) but everything to do with the sense of violation or needing normalcy, especially once Russell passed. Some readers will find that trivial; others will completely understand the symbolism and the sense of wrongness and impossible justice that carries through the rest of the book.

Personally, I really liked the voice. If I’m going off of favorite essayists, she reminds me of a few I like a lot: Fran Lebowitz, Jessi Klein, and Meghan O’Rourke, of course. It even reminded me (very much so) of a novel that came out earlier this year that I read at my friend Clare Mulroy’s recommendation: Maggie, or: a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar.

Both books have this knack for elaborate, personalized metaphor that feels significant to building a sense of intimacy. They’re meta in the sense that the author (or narrator) is equally bewildered by and interrogating how one simple, normal thing became salient to them or infused with meaning. That’s hard to describe without me pulling specific fragments of the text, but I’ll get there.

First, the reading experience was lovely. Grief Is for People involves a bunch of different anecdotes and segues, but they all flow so smoothly into each other that I didn’t much care where one segment ended or began.

Writing-wise, she relies a lot on clever turns of phrase, which were hit or miss for me. I’ve noticed this a lot in regards to sentences being—as I call them—counterweights and reliant on wordplay. It either strikes me as genius (Fredrik Backman, Maggie Stiefvater) or as word salad (ChatGPT.) There were lines I would absolutely go to bat for within Grief Is for People, and it’s overall beautifully written, and there were also short segments that had me scratching my head a bit. I got tired of some tricks.

Overall, I thought Grief Is for People was solid. It felt deeply human and introspective in the sense that I felt the specificity of Crosley’s worldview, which is a favorite quality of mine that makes someone significant. It was similar to other writers I love, but not interchangeable.

“It's impossible to predict how much you'll miss something when it's gone, to game grief in advance. We fend off the worry that we're taking our lives for granted by feeding ourselves the lie that we understand the value if their components.”

“Denial is also the weirdest stage of grief because it so closely mimics stupidity.”

Her considerations around grief, continuity, friendship, New York, etc. were measured and intelligent; you could tell she’s mulled over each of these conclusions as both a writer and person respectively, and might treat each moment differently depending on which hat she’s wearing.

Voice & Tone

I’d say that the one real oddity of Grief Is for People is that you can tell it’s written with the awareness that it’ll be read by the social circle involving her and her deceased friend, Russell, so there are absolutely moments in which it feels like she’s not coming out and saying something because it might complicate her personal life. (The curse of memoir, especially in NYC.) It’s not a critique, just a note that it definitely influences the flavor of her focus.

There are a few references or veiled names that are layered in vagueness to maybe seem poetic, but I suspected that it was because both she and Russell worked in book publishing and couldn’t get too deep into their drama without causing any problems. There are still aspects of their life that should be protected. For that reason, Crosley never seems to escape the tendency to write defensively.

Similarly, readers might notice that her relationship with her boss and friend Russell (who she’s eulogizing) was weiiird. Of course, readers aren’t here to police it (as the relationship is unfortunately a past one due to his passing) but it does affect the reading experience. It so took me out of the narrative several significant times, and it intersects with the awareness that this is a book for a particular circle: like first, the mention of nudity being normal at his country house.

Crosley picks a weird hill to die on in being dismissive towards the young assistants who complain about inappropriate workplace behavior. Sure, Russell might “mean nothing” by his jokes, but it’s still not a good look especially with the power dynamics at work. Nobody is suggesting he’s secretly a horrible person for that not being appropriate workplace conduct—just that it’s inappropriate for the setting.

The environment they describe (wrestling in the office, for example) offers some blurry boundaries, and Crosley tenses at the idea anyone would have trouble or be uncomfortable with that going on at work. I wouldn’t mention that if not for the fact that it is...as mentioned...kind of a weird hill to die on when discussing Russell as a figure. She seems bothered that anyone was ever bothered by him.

Of course, this fits with the strangeness of the memoir’s scope in the first place; Crosley writes beautifully about the oddness of mourning someone when you are not their partner or a family member. How it can feel deeply personal, but also like you’re not entitled to the same reaction.

In some ways, she seems to write defensively to basically allow her relationship with him to take up space and sort of plant her flag as someone uniquely close to him. (I’m sure everyone close to them knows the depth of their relationship.) But that same POV is why many readers might realize that their relationship was at times beautiful but also very strange. It’s attempting to claim unusual closeness while rejecting any concern over it, which is a hard line to walk. There’s beauty in that, but also a lot of reasonable pause that doesn’t negate the emotion or sincerity of it.

2026 Update! Sloane Crosley has a long section in which she discusses the fallout from the James Frey memoir in which it turns out sections had been falsified. The author then painted this “book publishing needs a bad boy”-type persona that kicked off a lot of the autofiction-esque conversations we have currently—about how accurately memoir should stick to truth, or whether a wry wink re: irony is enough. I’m not particularly interested in autofiction/memoir debates, but those sections in Grief Is for People feel fascinating in the light of the latest memoir scandal re: The Tell.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, Grief Is for People was a winner. I see why it’s highly hyped. I also see why some people may not connect. Considering my sincere adoration for Fran Lebowitz and Jessi Klein and then the earnestness of Meghan O’Rourke, I’m not entirely surprised that a voice falling on the spectrum between the would win me over. It captures the weirdness of this vague, diffused grief beautifully: the fringe cases, and how it ripples into other aspects of life. Even just how you view a stolen ring! Also, that section with Dimitri: badass.

For fans of:

The Long Goodbye; You’ll Grow Out of It; The Fran Lebowitz Reader; The Year of Magical Thinking; Maggie, or: A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar; etc.