The Drawers Keep Popping Open: On Sloane Crosley’s “Grief Is for People”

“I CAN’T SEEM to find a moment alone with you.”

These despairing words appear in a passage close to the end of Sloane Crosley’s latest book, Grief Is for People (2024). The memoir traces the best-selling essayist and novelist’s response to learning that her dear friend Russell Perreault, who also happened to be her former boss and mentor, died by suicide. Crosley’s feelings and actions in the wake of the event, which occurred when she was on the cusp of turning 41 in the summer of 2019, are the focus of this tightly woven and sophisticated entrée into the genre of grief memoir.

The word “friend” has myriad connotations and context-dependent uses. Crosley notes from the get-go that it will be difficult to describe the relationship she shared with this person who meant so much to her. Still, she sets out to try and make the impress of their connection known. Accordingly, she examines both the time she shared with Perreault and the aftermath of his sudden death.

The author divides her memoir into sections tracking four of the five commonly employed, although often contested, “stages of grief” popularized by the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. In lieu of the final stage, “acceptance”—which, following Freud, is generally associated with a kind of letting go—Crosley simply inserts an “afterward.” In other words, she remains heartbroken. At the same time, she has come to understand the “constant ache” left by her friend’s absence as a newfound part of her, a mood or mode she can tune into or draw upon as needed.

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When Perreault died, Crosley was an established writer living alone in a small apartment in the West Village. The two met 15 years earlier, when Perreault hired her to work in his publicity department at Vintage Books, a prestigious imprint of Knopf Doubleday. At the time, she was 25 years old. He was 37.

As Crosley tells it, Perreault’s larger-than-life personality dominated the office. She at once characterizes her former boss as a “frank” personality and a supportive, scheming playfellow. For example: unsure how her co-workers might respond, Crosley kept the news of her first-ever publication, an essay in The Village Voice, quiet. (“Media was more siloed then,” she explains, “and one’s side ambitions did not make one more employable.”) Yet she entered the Vintage office to find the halls “papered” with copies of her piece. It goes without saying that Perreault was the culprit—Crosley recalls that he even “slid a few underneath occupied bathroom stalls.”

The duo went through many forms of friendship and office drama over roughly a decade of working together. The latter included, most famously, the 2006 James Frey/Oprah scandal, in which—following a journalistic exposé revealing points of embellishment and modification between Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, and events that had occurred in his life—Oprah accused Frey of having “betrayed millions of readers” on live television. In her memoir, Crosley marks the episode as a turning point. Not only did the “century’s worst literary fiasco” put book publishers and their teams unusually front and center on a national scale; it also irreversibly shifted Perreault’s outlook on the industry. As Crosley writes, “the experience highlighted how little people knew or cared about book publishing, and we already suspected very little.”

In 2010, a few years after the publication of her best-selling essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (2008), Crosley left her job in publicity. But the up-and-coming writer’s friendship with Perreault didn’t end, and her memoir carefully maps the landscapes in and across which the two continued to meet, before and after their time working together. Crosley spent many weekends and summer days during her twenties at the Connecticut house Perreault shared with his longtime partner (there, the couple had named a tiny room after her). She and Perreault flitted to various parties and literary events around the city; the pair also made regular appearances at both the cinema and opera. They held intimate conversations over dinner, over the phone, and by way of the handwritten letters Crosley sent as she shuttled around the world on her numerous writing trips and book tours.

Crosley isn’t ignorant to the effect her departure from Vintage had on her friendship with Perreault. Though the two remained close, it was clear that—even five years after the Frey/Oprah episode—her friend was discontent both in his private life and at the office. As Crosley’s second career grew more successful, the work environment in which Perreault once thrived exhibited irrevocable changes. Increasingly, he felt like it held no place for him, and this feeling of professional alienation is one of several factors Crosley considers as she tries to make sense of her friend’s final act—an accounting that will, of course, never compute. “Reasons are not the problem,” she explains; anyone can supply possible rationales for unhappiness.

Crosley thus finds herself “banging on the walls of this story, trying to find a way in so that [she] might find a way out.” Yet it’s impossible to fully apprehend a loved one’s suicide, despite various writers’ efforts (A. Alvarez, Clancy Martin) to trace the escalating patterns of thoughts and behaviors. At the end of the day, the key witness can’t be summoned.

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One of the bizarre effects of publishing a grief memoir is that, unless the subject was already famous, that person—and the author’s relationship to them—is suddenly, intimately known to many more people than when they were living. Another strange by-product is that, in composing a portrait of a late friend, one necessarily turns one’s full, sustained attention to a person and relationship in a way that might otherwise be highly unusual. “Maybe,” suggests Hua Hsu in Stay True (2022), his Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir about the loss of his college friend, Ken, “taking seriously the ideas of our departed friends represents the ultimate expression of friendship.”

These two facets of what grief memoirs have the power to do—invite unknown others to learn about a once-private attachment—are meaningful yet fraught. On one hand, articulating loss can concretize (or, at the very least, tabulate) the subject of one’s love. On the other, trying to capture the past often enforces difficult confrontations with all that never was, and now never will be, known.

Though Crosley doesn’t write much about her friend’s life before they met, the little she shares suggests a darkness beyond her grasp. Perreault grew up “gay in a lower-middle-class enclave of New England,” and Crosley hints that coming to New York City represented a kind of escape for him. There, he found himself pulled towards eccentrics, outsiders, and underdogs, as well as those so wealthy they didn’t appear to care how their actions were perceived.

Clearly, Crosley’s friendship with Perreault was filled with mutual love and admiration. It was also a connection shaped by boundary crossings, ambiguous roles and rules, and a closeness aligned with an almost preternatural strangeness. (At one point she remarks that “[e]very man I have ever dated has felt the presence of a second father, and his partner has felt the presence of a daughter.”) Her friend never told her he loved her directly, but he told others that he did. He showered her with gifts; he also inflected their conversations with small yet occasionally stinging criticisms.

Early in the book, Crosley recalls the last time she saw her friend. It was three evenings before his death; she was going out of town, and Perreault was planning to house-sit. She remembers the moment vividly, invoking the immediacy of the present tense (as she does throughout the entirety of the volume):

Even after all this time, it’s odd to watch him take off his shoes and sit on my furniture, to know he’ll be sleeping in my bed, chastising me for my sparsely stocked fridge. My old boss, his hair more salt than pepper now. We are sometimes taken aback by our relationship, which is both over- and ill-defined.

In The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joan Didion describes how it was only after her husband died that she realized the incomplete nature of her view of him. “We imagined we knew everything the other thought,” she explains, “even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.” As for Didion, so too for Crosley: in spite of everything the writer relates about Perreault, there are evidently gaps in what she knows of his early life, and of the experiences he had when they were apart. More to the point, she will never be able to understand how much her friend shielded her from—or how much he was never able to share.

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Crosley’s memoir doesn’t open with Perreault’s death. The book begins with another loss, one that happened exactly 30 days before: in late June 2019, a break-in at Crosley’s apartment led to the theft of 41 pieces of jewelry. The thief also smashed a spice cabinet Crosley had purchased over a decade earlier at a flea market with Perreault (“In a way,” she writes, “the thief is stealing from him too”). He was the first person she called after the police arrived.

Crosley wrestles with how to balance her feelings over the burglary with those over the loss of her friend. Mired in the throes of what she pinpoints as her “denial” stage, she avers that “[r]ight now, every time I try to separate these losses, to keep the first from contaminating the second, they come back together like magnets.” This convergence is perhaps unsurprising: the jewelry is something concrete Crosley can obsess over. It’s also something she can still, potentially, recoup. She and Perreault shared a deep connection to objects, and grieving the theft is a way to stay connected to her friend, to recognize herself in him and his imprint on her.

Even so, as the memoir progresses, it becomes increasingly clear how different the two were from one another, as well as how much of himself Perreault had willfully obscured. “He banked his pain in some secret place where no one could see it,” Crosley notes, wondering, briefly, if she can too. “Maybe,” she writes of her own pain, “I can put mine in a cabinet”—adding immediately, that “the drawers keep popping open.”

Unlike her friend, Crosley makes her struggle public. There’s a kind of sad irony that sharing her loss with the world is the act that will finally, definitively separate the friends; as Hsu observed, distance is inevitably created by turning the loss of one’s friend into a story. (“The more I wrote about Ken,” he acknowledged, “the more he became someone else.”) Yet, like Hsu, Crosley understands the additional severance begat by her project as necessary—if not for letting go of her grief, then at least for moving forward with it. “I must learn,” she declares with respect to Perreault, “to accept that we are not the same.”

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Grief memoirs give shape to absences, transmuting pain into polished-seeming narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends. As Crosley is careful to note, her grief will continue indefinitely. But solidifying and sharing it with a reading public means letting go of something, including a certain relationship to the past and to previous versions of herself. “I had stored everything I liked best about myself in Russell,” Crosley laments. Her book, in turn, now holds much of what she remembers of him—of their time together and the person she was in his company.

Naturally, the published memoir provides just one version of the story. It’s an incomplete picture drawn, consciously, for the eyes of an audience. Still, Crosley, like Hsu and other grief memoirists before her, appears to find a paradoxical consolation in the perceived company of her readers. If she can never be alone with her friend again, at least she can share the force of her newfound solitude with the world.