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4.5 stars

I loved this book despite its imperfections. It contains powerful writing from Sloane Crosley about her grief process after one of her closest friends died by suicide. There’s so much sad honesty in these pages, about missing her friend, feeling angry at the world, about time passing and your person still being gone. I liked that she shines a spotlight on grieving a close friend given that grief in media is often portrayed centering a nuclear family member or romantic partner. Crosley’s prose overall impressed me � from the first page she jumps right into the action and I was hooked until the very end. I read this whole book in one afternoon.

There were a few passages in this book that took it to the five-star level for me, passages that captured grief in such a poignant and real way. There’s one passage about grief being like holding a vase and not having anywhere to put it down that made me cry. And the last few pages made me bawl. I loved these parts of the book and they felt so affirming to me in my own grief processes, that sometimes grief just is and you have to find a way to keep living even with the pain.

I want to be honest about what I perceive as some of the book’s faults, a minor one and then a more major one. First, I think at times Crosley’s prose read as a bit intellectualized to me, when she could’ve added even more detail about the friendship or her or her friend’s background. Second, I took some issue with how she wrote about Russell’s problematic behavior. I do think it’s important that she named the parts of her friend that weren’t ideal or that were problematic; I love not idealizing people who’ve passed away. Yet, some of her writing about his problematic behavior almost came across as making excuses for it. There’s one passage where she writes about the younger generation wanting to engage in activism and sublimating that desire through calling out their problematic bosses and I was like� uh people can both address structural inequality through broader actions and also call out harassment in the workplace? Basically, I feel she could’ve more directly just owned the fact that her friend engaged in problematic/harassing behavior instead of, in my view, dancing around it or overwriting about it. This could’ve even led to deeper exploration of what it’s like for privileged people (because her friend was a white man) to lose power or to get called out for harmful things they used to not get called out for.

Anyway, despite my quibbles about Grief is for People I loved the book and was deeply moved by it. Grief is so important to me personally and professionally and I’m heartened by this book’s addition to the grief canon.