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Tangling With Grief

Author Sloane Crosley had her apartment broken into and lost jewelry, most of it relatively inexpensive, some of it tied to strong family sentiment. She took this hard; this was a violation. Her closest friend and former boss, book publicist Russell Perreault, was the shoulder to cry on and the one person she felt comfortable confiding in. His reassurance: “If it’s any consolation,�� he said, “you can’t take it with you when you go.��

A few nights later he committed suicide.

Unexpectedly, she forges the two events together. If she can solve the robbery and recover the jewelry�� somehow it can turn events back. The first portion of the book has her working around the ineffectiveness of the police and doing her own investigation. This all-consuming mission acts as a protective cloak hiding her denial over the sudden loss of her friend. She even fantasizes about Russell, in death, recovering the jewelry for her.

As the title states, “Grief is for People,�� not possessions. As the jewelry issue fades, Sloane deals with the guilt, the post-traumatic stress disorder, and the thousands of questions this loss brings out. We get that she loved Richard dearly as a friend and desperately searches for a way to bring him back, that by her continued living she is leaving him behind. She does paint a loving picture of his quirkiness and we do get a sense of why he is so missed.

We are not smothered in a solemn gloomy mess, though. There is a lot of witty humor in this book, which is a good thing because it helps balance out an underlying anger Sloane expresses. “We have all committed the sin of not being able to bring him back.�� This does not profess to be a self-help book�� she actually mocks the rigidity of a lot of those and challenges the traditional ‘five stages of grief,�� they are not as neatly divided as put forward. Everyone wears their grief differently.

I was drawn to this book as a way to address some of my own recent grief issues, and, although the suicide focus is not something specifically relevant, a lot of chords were struck that rang true. I have just ordered Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking,�� her moving account of how she attempted to function in her world soaked in grief. That book is referred to a number of times here and when I first read it I was not looking at these issues from the same vantage point.

Please don’t be put off by the darkness you may associate with the subject matter. This is an excellent exploration of a place we are all bound to dwell in at some point. Again, serious questions addressed with an appropriately humorous slant. It is the tragedy comedy tradition.

“I still want to know where everything I loved has gone and why."

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, thank you to NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.