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"We tell ourselves stories in order to live..." So begins the embraced-to-the-point-of-asphyxiation Didion passage from The White Album. The line continues with: "We look for the sermon in the suicide." If there is a sermon to be found in what happened to Russell, it's that he needed to be told stories in order to live. He approached his life through the lens of fiction. It was how he divided the world into villains and victims, how he diagnosed those closest to him, how he diagnosed himself. He was not the first gay man in New York with an affinity for performance, but his addiction served not as a supplement to life, but, too often, as replacement for a story of his own. It was his way of weaseling out of the arduous task of recognizing his own gray areas, by framing everything through Carmen and Tosca. To wit: He was never big on museums. All the humanity, none of the humans. Call him when the paintings start sleeping with each other.

I find myself once again in the arena of the buzzworthy, closing the cover of a book that splashed for a moment on the New York lists, twisted to a ripple and is rippling still. It is an examination of grief that does perhaps belong on a shelf aside Didion, McDonald, C.S. Lewis and the like - all ridiculously literate; prose rising from the shimmering depth like a spiraling string of bubbles in a flute of Dom on the very worst night of your life. You will get drunk on this.

Sloane Crosley, writer, New Yorker, close friend of Russell, came home one day to a burgled apartment. Part of what left in the backpack of the thief was her grandmother's amber necklace. In retrospect, I wonder that she never once alluded to the way lives were known to catch themselves in the molten heart of these stones; lethal mistakes preserved for eternity. Too obvious? Too cliche? Clearly too something some thirty days (to the day) later when Russell woke up and decided to take his own life. The analysis of loss begins.

It is a small book. A brief book. A sharp Manhattan blade of a thing. And so I must, having roots in those environs, leave you with a bit more of its Lebowitzian wit:

Once, near the end of my time at Vintage, an author canceled his tour on account of a broken foot. He assured me he'd do anything else I asked. But when the writing assignments rolled in, requests for a list of favorite films or a description of a memorable meal, he demurred. He demurred in all caps. TELL THEM I BROKE MY GODDAMN FOOT.

I typed: Your writing foot?

(And the glasses are clinking, can you hear?)