It’s difficult and unfair to write about someone’s grief memoir. I felt this when I read Julian Barnes’ Levels of Life when this site was new and ugly, and writing anything about Sloane Crosley‘s memoir has been difficult for the same reason. I’m new to Crosley, and I picked this up after reading her piece in the New York Times over the holiday.
The book tackles two stories — the robbery of her apartment and the suicide of her close friend and former boss, Russell Perreault. The two events happened closely enough that they collide and overlap in Crosley’s memory, and while the book is split roughly in half between the two events, the death of her friend rightly stands much taller.
The first half of the book is mostly concerned with the robbery – a brazen, midday, apparently targeted thing. Crosley digs into the feelings of violation, invasion and insecurity that come from an event like that, but she also tells the unbelievable detective story about trying to recover some of it. It’s funny and unpredictable, but it’s also a way for Crosley to tell a complicated family history.
My grandmother was an awful person. I’ve never met anyone who misses her. She was abusive and creative about it. If she was irritated at one of her children, she would instruct the other two to give the offending child the silent treatment. When my mother was a kid, she would be sent to her room with the understanding that my grandmother would be up at any minute with a belt. Sometimes she showed. Sometimes she didn’t.
That ability to juxtapose ideas in wry, absurd ways appears throughout the book. Frequently she approaches the concept of suicide with an almost sympathetic voice, as though rather than asking why someone would do it, it makes more sense to ask why more people don’t take their own lives:
The miracle of life is not that we have it, it’s that most of us wake up every day and agree to fight for it, to hold it in our arms even when it squirms to get away. It’s a miracle, a genuine miracle, that the reverse doesn’t happen more often. Or, to quote Russell’s favorite film, The Lion in Winter: “Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives.’
At about the halfway point, the robbery story is finished, and Crosley has to confront a lot of Big Themes: death, hidden secrets, depression and other mental illness. The second half of the book is a lot of second-guessing, a lot of seeking answers that don’t (and can’t) exist, about Perrault’s relationship with his partner, his happiness with his life and career, and the hours leading up to his death.
Crosley tells the story of her grief and recovery (such as it is) in a beautiful and relatable way. It’s easy to see why so many felt compelled to reach out to her with their own stories.
