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Matt Katz: You're listening to WNYC. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Alison Stewart today. Listeners, before we get to the next segment, I want to let you know that our conversation is going to deal with suicide. If at any time you need support, please call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. That's all you have to do. Just call 988.

Over the course of just a few weeks, two life-changing events happened to writer Sloane Crosley. First, her apartment was broken into and ransacked, family heirlooms were stolen. Sloane was uneasy about this violation and determined to recover the jewelry. Then just a few weeks later, a much bigger tragedy, Sloane's best friend, Russell, her former boss and the executive director of publicity at Vintage Books, dies by suicide.

Sloane is left unmoored by grief and in her mind combines these two events, if only she can recover the lost jewelry, maybe time will rewind, and her friend will return. Sloane captures her grieving process and paints a brilliant portrait of her friend Russell in her new memoir, Grief Is for People. It is beautiful, and it is out now. Sloane will be speaking tonight at 6:30 at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, but first, she joins me now to discuss. Hi, Sloane.

Sloane Crosley: Hi, thank you for having me.

Matt Katz: Oh, it's so great to have you here. Listeners, we want to open the phones to you. Have you lost someone you love to suicide? What was something that helped you through that grieving experience? We want to hear from those who have lost someone to suicide. 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Again, the National Suicide hotline number is 988. Russell died in 2019. I'm curious when you felt ready to write this book. Were pieces of this something you started to jot down in the immediate aftermath of his death?

Sloane Crosley: I'm always fighting the urge to say I'm still waiting, [chuckles] but yes, I had the burglary, which I thought would make for an essay, if nothing else. There's one of those things where when you're a writer, you think, "Well, I can squeeze something out of this lemon," and this was a fairly large citrus fruit to be, the burglary. Then Russell died exactly one month later to the hour, and something else happened. It just became bigger. I kept taking notes, not necessarily for a book. I wasn't sure where it was going to go because I really had this strong feeling like if I didn't write it down, it would be like losing him twice.

Matt Katz: Then when you started writing it down because you open with the burglary. We know Russell had passed from the jump, but the story begins with the burglary. Did you know that those two things would be intertwined? Were you writing--

Sloane Crosley: Linked as it were?

Matt Katz: Linked, yes.

Sloane Crosley: No. I think that I should say I do know the difference between a burglary and a dear person who has died by suicide.

Matt Katz: Of course.

Sloane Crosley: I didn't actually really know until there was this overlap time period where this is a hopefully a rare thing, which is a suspenseful story about grief because we pretty much know how these things end, except for the fact that I went on a hunt to try to get some of the jewelry back, and Russell was helping me with that. He really became part of it. It's not like I thought that if I just got this one necklace back, he would reconstitute himself like a hologram and come spitting up in front of my face, but I really felt if I could stop this bleed of loss, then maybe everything would be okay. This is commonly known as magical thinking.

Matt Katz: In writing this and putting all of these thoughts, feelings, sometimes humor down on paper, did that help with the grieving process? Did that feel like the right thing that you needed to be doing to help deal with this thing?

Sloane Crosley: It's a great question, and I don't want to discourage people who write with that intent when I say that it made it so much worse.

Matt Katz: Because you were living in it all the time?

Sloane Crosley: Yes, it extended it to the point where when I finished the last paragraph, I really felt, "Okay, now we can begin." It really felt that, but it's worth it. You have to pick these things wisely because I think there's a huge piece of me in all my nonfiction, both the humorous essays and in this, and I think I'm offering up a piece of myself to spin out in the world for as long as the world will have me. Is it worth it? In this case, the answer was a resounding yes.

Matt Katz: It was worth it because it could help other--

Sloane Crosley: Yes, because it could help other people, because I could tell a story in a unique way that's actually quite a common story, which is a common story of grief and of friendship, and I could pay tribute to and write this elegy to not only this person who I love so much but people who work behind the scenes in the arts in general.

Matt Katz: You said after you finish writing, then you could begin the grieving process, but now it's out there in the world, and now you're talking about it every day, right? You're [unintelligible 00:05:45] you're on TV.

Sloane Crosley: [chuckles] What have I done?

Matt Katz: Is that?

Sloane Crosley: I will not cry on stage at BNN. I say, not promising, really. No, of course, because the thing is time passes, and these things take a different shape. What I'm left with now is both my personal memories of my friend and this different form of him in a book. He was so social. He was like pathologically social. As hokey as this sounds, I'm bringing him more people. I hate to say friends, that sounds silly, but people.

Matt Katz: Sure. He would have been pleased at this idea of you publishing this book?

Sloane Crosley: Who knows? That's the thing is, when someone dies by suicide, you go and you weigh it as far as you possibly can into what you know of them, using those pathways of context clues-

Matt Katz: Sure.

Sloane Crosley: -but there's a limit. The bridge only goes halfway through. I don't really know. I think he would be proud of me. I think he'd like the book. This is also someone, though, who was clearly at the end inclined towards self-erasure. I think it might take him a while to get around to reading a book about himself.

Matt Katz: Yes. Well, let's rewind a little bit. Tell us your impression of Russell when you first met.

Sloane Crosley: Gladly. It's a funny book, but it's also a dark book, and so much of it is a nightmare, but this part of saying going on a will-listen-to show and saying, "Tell me about your friend," of course. He hired me to work at Vintage Books. I worked for him for 10 years in the publicity department. It's an imprint of Random House for those who don't know. I wasn't even sure if I wanted to take the job, which is a ridiculously bratty thing that I did.

I asked to come in for a second interview, which is crazy in today's media landscape that I did that. He leaned across the table, and he said after I was done pouring out all these questions, and he said, "What are you doing?" I was like, "Excuse me?" He's like, "It's like you've been admitted to Harvard, but first you need a tour of the bathrooms. Go pick a book. If you don't like it, you don't have to work here." I'm like, "Okay." I picked Heartburn by Nora Ephron, and then I worked for him for 10 years.

Matt Katz: Wow.

Sloane Crosley: We became friends the way people do. It was like a partnership where the roles change. It bleeds into lunch and bleeds into outside the office, and he was a very important person for me.

Matt Katz: He was a boss, and he was a friend. How did that get complicated sometimes?

Sloane Crosley: [chuckles] Casual maniac. [laughter] He had difficulty reining in his wit when it wasn't appropriate. Now, I should say that though he was a difficult boss, and though he had some problems at work, he fought for people's raises. He was a very generous person. He was very caring to the people who worked underneath him. When we think about someone who's inappropriate at work, that might be someone who's-- you'd get into sexual harassment territory, and things like that, but he did say some inappropriate things.

I remember at some point, my assistant walked in, and she wore this conservative but tight-fitting cardigan, and he looked at her. [chuckles] Without skipping a beat, he said, "Oh, my God, it's like you walked into Talbots, and said, 'Give me the sluttiest thing you have.'" I was like, "Oh, no." [chuckles] I clearly had to pull her over afterwards to ask if she was okay, and she was.

I think that it's all fun and games until it didn't really fit in, but it wasn't necessarily his behavior that closed in on him. I think it was a world that was less interested in books. While the internal pressure to get press for them remain the same, you know as well as anyone here that the outlets to promote books started dwindling.

Matt Katz: Sure, and the role of a publicist, it changes.

Sloane Crosley: The role of a publicist. Now, this is a piece of the dark trivial pursuit board that led to what happened. This isn't what happened, but it didn't help.

Matt Katz: I wanted you to read an excerpt if you're okay with that.

Sloane Crosley: I'm okay. Are you okay?

Matt Katz: Yes, I'm okay. I would love to hear you read a piece. I had pulled something, but do we need to set it up slightly?

Sloane Crosley: Do we need to set it up? Let's see. Let's just take a little gander on live radio. I think it's okay. I think we're good.

Matt Katz: Let's hear--

Sloane Crosley: I guess the only setup is this is the, again, the hinge, if you will.

Matt Katz: Yes, sure.

Sloane Crosley: Or one of the points of hinge between the burglary loss and the loss of a human being.

Matt Katz: Very good. This is Grief Is for People from Sloane Crosley.

Sloane Crosley: A grief support group seems at once dramatic and doable. I won't be so proprietary about the burglary around other burglarized people. It will feel good to show deference the second anyone says masked or gunpoint. When I look for a place to go, I can't find one. There are spaces, some literal, some virtual for those left behind by cancer, heart attacks, or natural disasters.

There are conversations meant for widows and parents and children, but there are no bereavement groups for stuff. They don't exist. I'm sorry, your house blew up, but it was only a house. Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share in this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell and people like me now, we don't know where sadness belongs.

We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shells, injecting our feelings into objects that won't judge or abandon us, holding onto the past in this tangible way, but everyone else has their priorities straight.

Matt Katz: It's very moving, Sloane.

Sloane Crosley: Thank you.

Matt Katz: What have you come to understand might be unique about the grief that's experienced by loved ones who are mourning a death by suicide as opposed to all the other myriad kinds of loss that we might experience in life?

Sloane Crosley: The way I describe it in the book is that it's math; you work backwards instead of forwards. You're not preparing. It's not like your parents. It's not like someone who's been diagnosed with something. By the way, I'm not implying these things are picnics. I'm just saying that it's different. With this, there's this feeling of a sudden moment, a fulcrum moment that you missed that you-- not that you-- I think it's hubris to imply you could have stopped somebody when people say, either did you know, or could you have done anything?

This is not a David Foster Wallace situation. This is a cogent 52-year-old man who I couldn't chain to a radiator if I tried. He was going to have his own motivations. I think I learned that you have to get that extra layer, that outer layer of guilt off of you so that you can properly mourn the person you loved and so that their death does not cannibalize their life. I don't know if people have that. I doubt they have it.

I have had people close to me die of cancer, of other natural causes. I haven't thought, "This now is taking over this visual-- this horrible moment is taking over 60% of how well I knew them." With a suicide, there is the danger of that. Part of the book is that it's joyous. I had a whole wonderful relationship with this person that had nothing to do with his last act of free will.

Matt Katz: It does feel joyous at times. It feels funny.

Sloane Crosley: I know. That's such an obnoxious thing to say. I know.

Matt Katz: It's not just dark humor, although I guess there's some of that, but it's just in the-

Sloane Crosley: It's him. I know it's ridiculous to just say--

Matt Katz: -[unintelligible 00:13:54] him and your relationship.

Sloane Crosley: Some of the dialogue is his, the Talbots bit. I didn't say that.

[laughter]

Matt Katz: Right.

Sloane Crosley: I would not have.

Matt Katz: When you were talking about the uniqueness of dealing with a loved one dies by suicide, you said that the phrase from other people when you experience this loss, did you know should be banned?

Sloane Crosley: I should amend that slightly. I think anything that you say that's authentic should not be banned. Someone is asking, you find out that your friend's friend died by suicide, and you say, "Did you know?" There's a way to convey that you're asking that because you're concerned about your own loved ones, and then there's a way to say it as a knee-jerk response where the answer doesn't really matter.

It's not about me who's grieving. It's certainly not about the dead person. It's not helping them. It's like a knee-jerk rubbernecking of a horrible story. I don't think anyone means anything bad by it. Not a single thing. It's just the first question that comes to people's minds. My more grace-granting self would say that people are asking because it's so scary. They're trying to use your story to scan their own lives, and that's okay. It's just that it's not helpful to the grieving person in that moment unless it's really sincere.

Matt Katz: Sure. Is there something that you've come to understand better about yourself through this process? Do you feel like you know how you tick a little bit better than you might have before you went through this?

Sloane Crosley: I think if there is something like that, it's to be found in the passage I read a little bit, which is that I really loved Russell in the way that I think adults don't really love each other. I really looked up to him. I wanted our tastes to be the same. It was almost like an immature relationship where I'm like, "What are you wearing to class today?"

Except mentally. [laughs] I think that part of that is he had such an affection for objects. He was a big person at the-- He loved a flea market. it wasn't enough for you to just hold this heinous ashtray shaped like a flamingo that he had purchased. You had to agree about how great it was.

He held onto the past in all these different ways. He loved classic books, which was perfectly healthy, old Hollywood movies. He really dwelled there. I think I have learned to let things go more than he did in life.

Matt Katz: Sloane, we're going to have to leave it there. We didn't take any callers, but we got to hear your experience, and thank you for sharing the story with the world.

Sloane Crosley: Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for having me here. It's great.

Matt Katz: Grief Is for People is out now by Sloane Crosley. Thank you, Sloane.

Sloane Crosley: Thanks.

 

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