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66
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
37/100Critics
96/100Scholars
Author:
Sloane Crosley
Publisher:
MCD
Date:
February 27, 2024
A memoir about the suicide of the author's closest friend and the ensuing grief process.
What The Reviewers Say
If Crosley’s descriptions of love for Russell are often dazzling and unexpected, her meditations on grief are occasionally clichéd. But bromides are par for the course when it comes to bereavement, and this, too, is part of the indignity of loss.
Not without amusing episodes — I don’t know that someone as funny as Crosley appears on the page could abandon humor entirely — but overall the book is more bold, probing, and exposed than anything else she has published.
The weight of suicide as a subject, paired with Crosley’s exceptional ability to write juicy conversation, prevents it from being the kind of slim volume one flies through and forgets. Her signature shrewdness comes through particularly in the Depression section, which shows the author in the depths of her grief, but offers relief through humorous lines of dialogue and passing thoughts on pandemic-era activities.
By wrangling her complicated friend onto the pages of this elegiac book, Crosley holds onto what she can. The result is a noteworthy addition to the literature of grief..
