_{http://www.amazon.com/Grief-People-Sloane-Crosley}

“A best book of 2024 “, GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE by Sloane Crosley is the fourth book and author selected for memoir analysis. It’s a heart-wrenching memoir that addresses the theft of family jewelry AND even more devastating, loss of a best friend to suicide.

Here are a few quick observations:

• “Is it wrong to say that a memoir about loss and grieving is fun to read? If so, I’m in trouble, because I enjoyed every word of this book. I also ached and suffered along with Sloane Crosley: Her portrait of mourning after the suicide of her best friend is gutting and deeply engaging.” Susan Orlean, author of The Orchard Thief,
• It has approximately 57k words spread over 8 chapters.
•  “Like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Grief Is for People takes us through the ordinary, awful, and never-quite-ending experience of loss. It also made me laugh very hard, many times. I can’t stop thinking about it.” — John Mulaney

Unlike the three books previously reviewed, Crosley’s book offers a poignant, gallows humor, tale of two emotional losses in 2019 which were further exacerbated by the pandemic that hit the world and her NYC lifestyle.

While all our worlds were severely disrupted by Covid 19, Crosley’s, foggy upside-down, world began some six months earlier and still defines her life five years later. Perhaps time does heal but not nearly as fast as we would hope. This book is definitely worth reading now and in the future.

More successful memoirs will be reviewed in the weeks to come.