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Crosley's first memoir shows the author lost in grief after the suicide of her best friend and former colleague, , who hanged himself in 2019. The book's strength is also its weakness: Crosley depicts the process of coming to terms with what happened as messy, fragmentary, and mysterious. Thus, it is rendered realistically from a psychological standpoint, but the construction diminishes the essayistic force when mundane scenes that suddenly acquire meaning and random connections the mind makes under such pressure get the same (and frequently more) weight than the parts that are interesting on the factual level.

The book rests and emotional movements, and it does so intentionally, meaning that the text is just as much about Crosley as about Perreault. But I wanted to hear more about Perreault's backstory and his possible motivations. I only briefly learnt how he, as a gay man, fled to NYC to live freely, how he did tend to not supplement, but replace his life with performance art, and, most interestingly, how he received regular complaints for his behavior at work because he was stuck in the old world where harsh, inappropriate words from older men were just accepted. I was wondering: How did Crosley feel about it, did they talk about it? Of course there can't be one definite answer as to why a person ends their life, but the neuralgic points remained too murky for me. I also loved the little bits and pieces about the publishing world, like the scandal around A Million Little Pieces, and I wanted more.

Still, Crosley remains a great writer, and it's intriguing to witness her trying to capture the unspeakable. The title hints at the fact that with a person, a whole world disappears, also a world of things, routines, events. There are many smart little throwaways in there, relating to the power of anger, for instance, or the existential loneliness that becomes graspable when you realize you can't fully know a person. I wished the text made more of it potential though.