Title: Grief is For People by Sloane Crosley
Book Beginnings quote:
All burglaries are alike, but every burglary is uninsured in its own way.
Friday56 quote:
During the closing lecture of the festival, a Scottish author winds down her reading with a folk song about the sea...She lilts all over the stage. I imagine this moment holding me up on its hip, bouncing me. Wave goodbye to Russell! Say: Bye-bye, Russell! I can feel my heart pounding in my neck. Salt water drips down my face and I scratch my pinkie so hard, I nearly break the skin.
Summary: Following the death of her closest friend, Sloane Crosley explores multiple kinds of loss in this disarmingly witty and poignant memoir. (Publisher)
Review: This book wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It took me several chapters and a major thought-realignment to get my brain around the reality of the book not the imaginary one I had worked out in my head. I was expecting a self-help book for those coping with grief. This is NOT that book.
This is a memoir about friendship and death. This is a hard book, one which consolidates the truth -- Everyone grieves in different way and there is no timeline on that grief. The last chapters were especially poignant as Sloane Crosley gains a bit of distance from her grief and is able to take a look at it with a bit of objectivity. A bit.
When Sloane's friend, Russell, dies by suicide, she is left to grapple with her grief alone. She loosely follows the Kubler-Ross stages of grief for her format: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as she outlines what her life was like after his death. In the middle of all this, a pandemic descends on the world and she has to cope with it, too, just like we all did. See why I say it is a hard book?
I admit I spent the whole last half of the book crying -- not for the death of Russell, I didn't know him. But for the death of D, who I did, and for all those people, like Sloane Crosley, who are forced to traverse alone in an unknown world known as "Grief World." It reminded me of this quote from another book Hum If You Don't Know the Words:
Only after I had learned those boundaries and generalities of my grief was I able to venture further into the mountains and valleys, the peaks and troughs of my despair. And as I traversed them-breathing a sigh of relief thinking that I'd conquered the worst of it-only then would I finally arrive at the truth about loss, the part no one ever warns you about: that grief is a city all of its own, built high on a hill and surrounded by stone walls. It is a fortress that you will inhabit for the rest of your life, walking its dead-end roads forever. The trick is to stop trying to escape and, instead, to make yourself at home. (Hum If You Don't Know the Words, 320).There were two excerpts which touched me specifically. Let me see if I can find them...
“But there was never going to be a version of the story in which it wasn't my missing jewelry and my dead friend. You can ignore grief. You push it around your plate. But you can't give it away.”
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"My grief for you will always be unruly, even as I know it contains the logic of everyone who has ever felt it. Sometimes I close my eyes so that I can listen to it spread. So I can make it spread. I run it up the walls of my apartment. I listen to it circle the door frames and propel itself out the window. I can hear it clonking down the fire escape, cracking the concrete as it lands. Sometimes I hear it in the rivers, sloshing against the stone, or in the subway screeching to a halt. And then because I cannot call you home, I call it home. I open my eyes and in a flash it come back to me, zipping itself to my edges, bobbing between my fingers. It's made a real life for itself here. Oblivious to its own power, it snores sweetly on my chest, this outline of a woman whose time has not yet come."
Both of these quotes really spoke to be about how grief changes us and it can't be ignored. We are forced to grapple with grief once it arrives at our doorstep.
I do recommend this book, but it isn't an easy read. If you are in the middle of a deep grief, I'd proceed with caution.
My rating 4.25 stars.
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