Grief Is For People

Have you ever lost a thing that felt suspiciously like a person—then later lost the person the thing reminded you of? In Grief Is for People, Sloane Crosley argues that the line between grieving objects and grieving people is far blurrier than we admit. She contends that while grief properly belongs to humans, we often outsource it to objects because things let us hold, arrange, and narrate what resists holding, arranging, and narrating. But to do that safely, you have to face the mess underneath: denial, bargaining, anger, and depression—not as tidy “stages,” but as weather systems that roll in and out.

Crosley frames the memoir around two detonations a month apart in 2019: a daytime burglary of her West Village apartment (forty-one pieces of jewelry gone in five minutes) and the suicide of her best friend and former boss, the beloved book publicist Russell Perreault, who hanged himself in the barn of his Connecticut home. The first loss is a dark gift of delineation—she knows the exact minute the absence began. The second hollows out time itself, collapsing the before and after. One grief trains her eye on objects; the other forces her to reckon with love, agency, and the stories we tell about the dead.

A double loss—and a double bind

The memoir opens with the thief’s boots sinking into a white comforter as he raids a 1920s Dutch spice cabinet—drawers labeled in Dutch, a ceramic “eieren” egg-door with necklace shelves inside—carting off heirlooms: a grandmother’s amber amulet the size of an apricot, a green tourmaline dome ring like a kryptonite soap bubble, a tiger’s-eye square ring Russell once noted on her résumé. The cabinet itself is a relic of their friendship; he spotted it at a flea market and insisted it was “waiting for you.” Hours later, Crosley is the tragic heroine among friends, a fun kind of tragedy. But within a month, Russell is gone. The two events magnetize—“hideous sisters”—refusing to stay in separate entrances. The book asks: what happens when your grief for things becomes the only place you can physically touch the grief for a person?

What Crosley contends

She contends that denial is less a stage than a survival skill that mimics stupidity; that bargaining can masquerade as detective work (feverish searches of pawnshops and eBay, $68 wire transfers to buy back a return address); that anger often finds the nearest available target (a police detective in a too-tight suit, a well-meaning super, a stranger on a Citi Bike); and that depression is not merely private but public—especially in a New York City emptied by a pandemic where even Grand Central’s celestial ceiling faces backward. Most of all, she contends that objects become our grief’s proxy because they are our inverse: delicate meanings in solid form (while people are solid bodies with delicate interiors). They are how you hold what you can’t hold.

How the book works on you

Crosley moves through five sections—Denial, Object Permanence (Bargaining), Anger, Depression, and an Afterward—braiding memoir with criticism and a brisk literary bookshelf (Joan Didion, A. Alvarez, Kay Redfield Jamison, Rilke, Freud, Willa Cather). You feel the narrative tighten into a procedural—security footage of a latex-gloved climber; a Sheepshead Bay return label; a sting in the Diamond District with a man named Dimitri—then loosen into philosophical air: is suicide a loophole or a sentence? Can you ever “get back” what’s lost? Is the question itself misguided?

Why this matters to you

If you’ve ever clutched a thing that felt like a person, or a place that felt like a time, this book names what you’re doing: trying to relocate love from the vanishing to the grippable. Crosley refuses the pieties of consolation. She admits to fantasies that embarrass her—a lost-and-found in heaven where the dead retrieve our missing jewelry; the idea that if she can recover the amulet, Russell might be a little less dead. In doing so, she grants you permission to be illogical in the most human way. The payoff isn’t a tidy acceptance. It’s a sturdier vocabulary and a few hard-won metaphors: a locket breached by a stranger’s fingers; a cliff in Sydney you can’t jump from; two halves of a broken gold chain—one thrown into the Pacific, the other found years later wedged in her copy of Edie—like a private version of Walter De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer reaching down unanswered.

What you’ll take from this summary

You’ll see how denial tries to tidy shock by narrating it; how bargaining keeps you busy long enough for truth to land; how anger can disguise love and a changing industry can grind a person down; how depression in a city with no people changes the physics of time; and how, in the end, acceptance looks less like closure and more like choosing the living while letting grief curl up and sleep on your chest. Along the way you’ll meet Russell—the prankster mentor who loved objects and Old Hollywood, loathed milk glass, and posted a last caption about “Rudbeckia running rampant”—and watch Crosley do the unruly work of loving him after he’s gone.

Crosley begins with a burglary but writes it in the present tense, a choice that mimics denial: If I retell it right, maybe I can still grab an ankle. A thief scurries up the fire escape, steps onto her bed, opens the “eieren” door of a Dutch spice cabinet, yanks out its necklace shelves like a bowling ball, and leaves with forty-one pieces of jewelry in five minutes. To narrate is to control; to press rewind is to imagine choice where there was none. Denial, she argues, is humankind’s specialty—not because we refuse reality, but because we buy time to meet it.

The consolations—and traps—of narration

In the hours after, friends become amateur sleuths over appetizers. Everyone wants the “thought experiment” more than the experience, like a live round of The Book of Questions (remember that button you’d press to save a loved one?). Crosley detects the comfort: a solvable puzzle suggests a controllable world. She catalogs loss for the police and discovers a skyline of memory—her grandmother’s amber amulet, a tiger’s-eye ring Russell once admired in her job interview, a green tourmaline dome ring she’d never wear on a plane. As she lists, attachment intensifies. The more she narrates, the more the objects become people—“spiritual avatars, more loyal than most.”

Targeted: when the story turns on you

Security footage shows a latex-gloved man pacing, then scaling the wall. He ignores other apartments. He watches her leave, then returns the way he came. The detective’s word “targeted” lands like a toxin: a midpoint between observed and stalked. Now denial morphs into pattern-seeking. Was it the Instagram photos (a fashion-mag essay she wrote about jewelry)? A neighbor’s teen with a grudge? The breakup a week earlier—an inside job offering the detective less paperwork? Every theory both flatters and accuses her. This is the early grief reflex: if danger obeys a story, you can reverse-engineer safety.

Denial that something bigger is coming

Running beneath the burglary is another hum: Russell’s fingerprints are on the cabinet. Flea-market mornings at dawn. His delight in a find (“It was waiting for you”). Crosley confesses to feeling “unmoored” but she is, for now, a fun kind of tragic heroine—no one was home; this is retrocrime, almost cinematic. The present tense floats her—“The past is quicksand and the future unknowable.” But denial has a second job: sparing you a glimpse of the larger wave. Thirty days later, Russell will die. She will try to split the losses, fly and elephant, separate entrances. But they keep snapping back together as if magnetized.

What denial buys you

It buys you the power to function. She scrubs fingerprint dust at 2 a.m., answers emails with one hand while gluing a ceramic drawer with the other. She tells herself there’s no trauma; she wasn’t home. Then the trauma “humps my leg like a dog”—a dark joke that names how denial never abolishes pain; it amortizes it. (Compare Didion’s “magical thinking,” which lets a widow keep shoes in the closet because the dead may need them; here, Crosley keeps the narrative running because the story may need her.) Denial also lets her practice a more merciful skill she’ll rely on later: living in the present sentence, not the past paragraph.

The “little” story that won’t stay little

A neighbor tapes “I feel bad for you” to her door; another regales her with the time a car stereo was stolen. She bristles at the hierarchy of violation—people pretend the “invasion” matters more than the jewelry to flatten status differences. But the violation is just the booster rocket; the primary payload is attachment. Even her attempt to find a grief group for burglary stalls—there are support circles for cancer, heart attacks, terrorism, widows, parents, children. “Grief is for people, not things.” And yet she is already teaching you the memoir’s thesis: you grieve in things what you cannot yet bear to grieve in people. Denial is the bridge.

Key Idea

Denial isn’t stupidity; it’s narrative oxygen. You tell the story you can bear until you can bear a truer one.

If peekaboo trains toddlers that hidden things still exist, grief trains adults to keep believing long after the curtain has fallen. Crosley calls the second movement of her story “Object Permanence” and tests, almost to the point of self-parody, how much permanence an object can bear. The spice cabinet becomes an altar; the missing shelves (that Russell fixates on) become the crime’s deepest injury; a half-broken gold chain becomes a relic that will later meet its other half like a secular prayer.

Why “stuff” can’t be dismissed

She looks for a bereavement group “for things” and finds…nothing. The world enforces a rule: grief is for people. Yet she recognizes her (and Russell’s) strategy—stashing emotion in objects that won’t judge, that won’t leave. A friend’s mother gives her the parable she needs: a beloved Swedish brooch goes missing; the suspected window washer goes to prison for something else; she waits in Rikers’ lobby all day to send a single question: what happened to it? Answer: pried apart and melted. Horror and relief snap together—the “green dome ring,” plucked apart “with a pair of pliers,” is gone forever. The lesson lands: you must learn to be okay with never knowing why—and with never getting it back.

Can the lost be un-lost?

In a virtual suicide-survivor group, a woman asks, “Can we ever get back what’s lost?” Replies split: “No.” “Yes.” “Maybe.” Then a long post (from a man whose twins died by double suicide) reframes it: you can get back your life-as-you-knew-it in a new form; you cannot get your person back, except in ways almost impossible. This “almost” is enough fuel for Crosley’s bargaining. Months later, a kind reader (nicknamed “Egg”) spots her amber amulet and tiger’s-eye ring on eBay. She wins the ring for $68—she pays not for a gemstone but a return address. The amulet sits at a sky-high price on a new seller’s page. “Almost impossible” turns into a plan.

What bargaining looks like up close

She calls a detective (probable cause becomes a cul-de-sac), eBay’s law-enforcement desk (no serial numbers, no help), and finally mounts a vigilante caper: her ex-boyfriend, a vintage-Rolex connoisseur, “wins” a watch to get the seller’s address in the Diamond District. When he aborts—the room is too shady; the watch never appears—Crosley goes herself. Suite 303 is a fluorescent cube: a safe, folding chairs, a La-Z-Boy napping elder, men in tracksuits, a PBS documentary on Iran murmuring in the corner. She lays out photos, tells the story, and waits as the men whisper in Hebrew. Finally, a man named Dimitri retrieves a plastic sandwich bag from the safe and spills the amulet into her palm. “Take it. That shouldn’t have happened.” Justice, from someone who traffics in the murky, lands like a benediction.

What this gives—and what it can’t

The amulet is lighter than her memory. Back home, she realizes she’d tried to bargain her way backward in time, to keep one of them (her, Russell, the world) unchanged. Objects can cross thresholds the dead can’t. But they can’t reverse the direction of time. (Kay Redfield Jamison makes a similar distinction between recovery and restoration in Night Falls Fast—you rebuild meaning; you do not reinstall the past.) Still, a notable faith survives: perhaps the dead know, in some coherent-to-them way, what happens soon after they die. Perhaps a single object can be a bridge from where they are to where you are. This is object permanence in grief’s adult key: not proof the person exists, but proof that your love does.

Key Idea

Bargaining fails as time travel but succeeds as meaning-making. You don’t bring them back; you bring yourself forward.

To understand this grief, you have to meet Russell—Crosley’s boss-turned-best-friend at Vintage/Knopf, a dazzling publicist who mixed Kool-Aid and drank it, a flea-market pirate with a taste for Old Hollywood and mid-century jugs so cool he refused a Martha Stewart photo spread for fear he’d never “fleece” again (“Just look what they did to milk glass”). He loved objects because they kept their bargains: clocks and lamps didn’t betray, and he could adore them exactly for what they were. He detested sadness and earnestness in equal measure—but he demanded the kind of adoration that sees you exactly as you are.

The origin story: a square ring and an open Rolodex

She finds her résumé in his files, annotated: “Long brown hair. Square ring.” He hires her after she grills him at a second interview (“It’s like you’ve been admitted to Harvard but require a tour of the bathrooms”). He prints and tapes her first essay all over the office; he also forges a faux-critical author email, then tackles her to delete it as soda spills—both prank and pedagogy. They become a matched set: “Find one of us, pull the string, you’d find the other.” Weekends in Connecticut are Shangri-La—husky dogs, paper lanterns, tomatoes, Etta James, card games, and, in the distance, a derelict barn she never enters.

The shadow arrives

As years pass, Russell’s social light dims. An emotional entanglement in the early 2000s destabilizes the house’s guest-verse; later, workplace stress and culture shifts corrode joy. He grows spikier post-A Million Little Pieces scandal (Crosley’s insider account of Oprah’s “public stoning” is a blistering microhistory). Complaints accumulate—some grounded, some opportunistic—in a climate where little and large infractions rush down the same pipe. He goes from mascot to “wild animal in a cage,” then to isolation. Yet his taste for underdogs remains (he becomes close with E. L. James during the Fifty Shades blitz). He can be cutting and kind in the same breath. People are complicated; he refuses to flatten himself to survive.

The last week

Three nights before he dies, Crosley buys him a lobster roll and briefs him on geriatric cat care. He orders what she orders. They gossip about his nephew’s upcoming visit and the end of worlds—romance and publishing alike. On the walk home, she confides a sobering acceptance: the green dome ring is gone for good (his favorite; its underside like the ceiling of a miniature museum). He hugs her and offers a last, almost comic balm: “If it’s any consolation, you can’t take it with you when you go.” On July 27, he posts a photo—“Rudbeckia running rampant along the north side of the barn”—walks the dogs, turns on the TV, and hangs himself from a rafter in that barn she never entered. His partner finds him. Alone when he died; alone when she hears.

How she loves him now

Anger sluices both everywhere and nowhere. Crosley repeats—on purpose—the misframed sentence that hurts into clarity: “My friend was alone when he was murdered.” She knows it’s wrong; it helps her breathe. She resents the question Did you know? (it’s less about the dead than the living seeking inoculation). She suspects suicide is a “tax on human consciousness”: most pay in micro-denominations (the impulse at the platform’s edge), some pay with their lives. She picks up lines that help—The Big Chill’s “I haven’t met that many happy people,” Rilke’s counsel to accept the horror in order to access life’s unspeakable powers—yet refuses neat sermons. If there’s a controversial comfort, it’s that Russell thought he’d won his argument with life, not lost it. Whether you agree is beside the point; she’s building a form that can hold him—as he was, not as we’d like him to be.

Key Idea

To grieve a complicated person honestly, you must keep their edges. Sanding them down kills them twice.

Crosley’s “anger” section is not a tantrum—it’s a systems check. How did the place that dignified Russell’s sensibilities become the place that ground him down? The memoir’s most reportorial spine revisits the James Frey implosion (Oprah’s scolding of Nan Talese; the dental X-rays; the manila envelope; the “public stoning” painting) and then follows the aftershocks into a workplace that changes faster than Russell can metabolize. The result: the same energy that once built careers now gets mistranslated as menace. He is “so loved,” a colleague texts Crosley later, “but also a wild animal in a cage.”

A love for institutions meets the end of one

When she arrives, Knopf/Vintage is the temple (“Harvard” with Nobelists in the hall). Russell’s gift is resurrection—keeping the dead alive in print, getting Achebe to Town Hall, summoning coverage where there was none. But post-Frey, the phones and the rules change. Layoffs, silos, and social media make the old levers less effective. He becomes the lightning rod for impossible demands (how much press is “more” when the Today show doesn’t want “your sloppy seconds”?), while agents and authors confuse publicity with penance.

Microclimate of grievance

Complaints gather. Some are legitimate corrections to an older culture; some are opportunistic. The absurd coexists with the necessary: a straight woman files what amounts to a sexual-harassment complaint against a gay man for freezing her out (he should have fired her kindly; instead he ignored her); an assistant thinks he’s “mean” for not sharing movie screeners and HR requires a make-up lunch. He’s both wrong and right in the wrong ways—a man out of time, out of patience, and then out of room to be himself without collateral damage.

Grief without a headline

After he dies, a string of industry giants pass (Susan Kamil; Sonny Mehta; later Carolyn Reidy). Obituaries bloom; Russell gets none—publicists are thanked until the last stop, then written out. Crosley becomes, by her own admission, a “funeralzilla”: she wants a small dinner with no dill and tight speeches—or else she wants a Fifth Avenue shutdown. Eventually, she concedes what we all learn: “The needs of the living are more important than the wants of the dead.” The memorial proceeds. She wears a dress he hated and shoes he loved. A compromise masquerading as an outfit, and a lesson masquerading as etiquette.

What this anger is really about

Anger, Crosley suggests, is a cousin of discernment—a boundary-setting intelligence Russell taught her. But anger also hunts for a place to land when the true target is gone. So she scolds her super, chases a non-apologizing cyclist, shuts out tender friends, hangs up on someone bottling vinegar during a condolence call. Underneath: the helplessness of a grief without recognition (no obituary), and the bruise of knowing the temple they built together has no ritual for him. The work became his shelter; then the shelter shrank. It’s a structural tragedy with personal shrapnel.

Key Idea

Institutional change can save some and crush others; grief includes the anger of watching the latter without easy villains to blame.

Crosley refuses to treat suicide as a solved case. Instead, she interrogates the myths that rush to fill the vacuum. She plays with language—“committed” (criminally tinged), “died by” (AP’s preference since 2015), even the purposeful misframing “murdered” (emotionally true, factually wrong)—to show how words are grief’s scaffolding. Then she pushes into thornier ground: method, agency, and that most dangerous of postmortem questions, Why?

The fight over the frame

She resents “Did you know?” because it’s less about Russell and more about bystanders seeking predictive power: if signs exist, perhaps we can teach ourselves to see them. She suspects (with The Big Chill’s line as ballast) that few of us are “happy enough” to meet any screening threshold. Suicide, she suggests, is a “tax on human consciousness”—most pay invisibly; some pay with their lives. (Compare Kay Redfield Jamison’s clinical framing in Night Falls Fast; Crosley’s is metaphoric but no less clarifying.)

Method matters—and doesn’t

She reads A. Alvarez’s The Savage God and fixates on method not as lurid detail but as a psychological wedge. Gas or pills leave a window for reversal and remorse; a rope does not. The lack of temporal distance between decision and consequence scrambles mourning: she can’t comfort herself with a version of Russell who “didn’t mean it.” She also interrogates our hunger to connect last signs to last acts (Didion linking Julia Child’s death with dinner plans in Magical Thinking), exposing the mind’s urge to soften randomness into narrative coherence.

A controversial solace

The one thought that comforts her: Russell believed he’d won—he no longer saw a place for himself in a world defined by the “illness of aging,” the threat of irrelevance, and the erosion of dignity. A Schopenhauerian stance (“my body, my choice”) filtered through a publicist who curated every shelf. You can object (Crosley allows, even invites it). But she also insists: to love him now requires letting his argument exist alongside hers. Anything else is ventriloquism.

Grief’s magical thinking—without apology

Crosley admits to fantasies she once judged—an afterlife lost-and-found where Russell picks through missing things; a heaven where he and Plato dine and debate milk glass; dreams of manatees and dolphins arriving in proportion to the happiness you need. These are not “solutions.” They’re humane errors—ways the mind makes a tolerable room out of the unbearable. If you’ve ever asked the air for a sign, you will recognize the move. The trick isn’t to stop; it’s to know what the trick is doing for you.

Key Idea

Let your dead keep their agency. Your love can argue back, but it can’t rewrite the last page without erasing the person.

When COVID drains New York of bodies, Crosley’s private depression finds a public echo. The city’s miracle—experience, not mere survival—goes on pause. Even Grand Central’s famously backward ceiling feels newly on-the-nose: east and west reversed, as if the gods and the commuters can’t agree which way is up. She recalls James Joyce’s snow “falling faintly” and decides: in a mass depressive event you don’t snap out; you endure the Sisyphean now.

Insomnia with a mouth on it

“Grief insomnia,” she writes, “has a mouth on it.” It mocks bromides about time healing and suggests you look at your phone anyway. (Thomas Merton warned: the more you avoid suffering, the more trivial tortures grow teeth.) Crosley walks empty avenues, listens to Mister Softee, passes taped-up air conditioners and taped-up windows, watches the city’s ads make unintentional jokes (“Made for staying put” vs. “Spread it around”). She cultivates small, rule-bending rituals—birthday candles swapped into cigarette packs, a lighter tossed in foil from seven floors up—micro-permissions to feel alive.

Grand Central: staging an opera for one

One morning she boards a parked Harlem Line train and populates it with ghosts she’s known: the dry cleaner who met Woody Allen (implausibly), a divorcé cellist, a guy from Lit Lounge who accused her of not dating Black men, a YMCA stranger who thought she cut the treadmill line. Then Russell arrives. He wants people. So she gives him an opera: the fifty-year-old rebounds poorly; the detective frames the jerk; the gym woman gets a better plot. When the bell chimes and Russell stands, she holds up a locket (a new habit: directing it like a camera so he can “see” trees in bloom). He looks for the green ring. “That I can’t help you with,” she says. “Believe me, I tried.” He kisses her hand and goes. She stays. She stands.

Depression’s reframe

Freud split mourning and melancholia; Crosley collapses them in a moment when time won’t move. If “a single person is missing and the whole world is empty” (Didion), then what happens when the whole world is empty and a single person is missing? You relearn scale. You stop expecting closure. You look for a ceiling that can hold a backward sky. And you practice choosing the living—if not grandly, then at least by stepping off a parked train into whatever this day is.

Key Idea

In a city without people, you become the chorus. Depression won’t move, so you do—an inch, a platform, a breath.

The book’s coda isn’t tidy acceptance; it’s a reckoning with symbols that refuse to behave. Crosley flies to Sydney determined to do something bracingly literal—jump from a thirty-six-foot cliff into Shark Bay—and can’t. Her body freezes at the edge. A friend films her “suicide drills” while the wind force-feeds her hair. The lesson is not failure; it’s anatomy: some thresholds you don’t cross by willpower. Back in the car, she’s still alive, which may be the point.

Breaking the chain (on purpose)

She’s brought half a broken gold chain—the one snapped when the thief ripped out the cabinet shelves—sealed in a sandwich bag. Alone on the cliff after her friend leaves to make a call, she drops it into the Pacific as a ceremonial address to where she secretly hopes Russell might be hiding. Months later, compulsively moving a bookshelf, she finds the other half wedged in her copy of Edie. The “private Vertical Earth Kilometer” is complete: one end in the ocean, one end in a book about a woman (Edie Sedgwick) whose orbit Russell adored. Unlike Walter De Maria’s sculpture, this object does have two ends, and they testify to an unfixable break.

The locket and the breach

At a party in Los Angeles, a woman idly opens Crosley’s locket—“Who’s this little guy?”—and jolts her back to the truth that even our sanctums are porous. She’s now the same age as Russell in the photo (forty-four). “It’s starting. I am catching up with you.” In that vertigo, she tries one last time to align object and person: can she keep him buried and keep him with her at once? The answer is a paradox you live, not a riddle you solve.

The final stance

Crosley ends with a promise that’s more bodily than philosophical: she calls grief home. She lets it “zip” back to her edges after roaming the city’s rivers and subways. She will side with the living, which is not the same as abandoning the dead. Most things, she writes, don’t end too many times. The chain, the cabinet, the barn—these ended. Russell ended. But love persists, unruly, a “small animal snoring” on her chest. Acceptance, then, is less a verdict than an ecosystem—of memory, object, gesture, and the daily work of not turning away.

Key Idea

You don’t “get over” people. You get on with them—by choosing life in a way that makes room for their permanent, breathing absence.