Sloane Crosley wrote one of my favorite books in recent years – the funny, strange, smart Cult Classic – and when I heard she released a memoir about grief, I knew I wanted to put that in my library queue.
In this memoir, Crosley tells about a terrible summer in 2019 when she experienced two jarring losses – first, a home burglary (while she was out) in which she lost some important jewelry (and a sense of safety at home), and shortly afterwards a dear friend and former co-worker died by suicide. Of course losing a person was worse, more emotionally impactful than the loss of jewelry – but because of their proximity to one another, the events are linked for her. This felt so true to grief, the way that your brain seeks patterns and connections however tenuous, all in an effort to comprehend the truly incomprehensible. Death is enormous, unfathomable – when you lose someone that you love, it’s not just a single loss, it’s the many moments of realizing that the loss is not temporary. It’s not like other trials in life – our brains might want to process the loss in the way you might resolve another problem, like a missing necklace. But though you might find a necklace one day, you will never be rewarded with a hug from your loved one again. Death is final, and part of that means that grief over a person never ends, it only changes.
This memoir was heartfelt and funny. Crosley’s elegy for her friend has five parts that correspond to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. There were unexpected moments of insight into the publishing industry, where Crosley and her friend worked when they met. She did not shy away from the more complicated aspects of her friend’s legacy, but she remained sensitive and loving towards his memory throughout.
This is a slim memoir, a smart and immensely readable book that could be read in a day. Crosley’s sharp insights are shared with depth, but it never strays into bleak territory.
While on the subject of grief, another book that I read this week and loved was a completely different way to digest losing someone you love. This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub was perhaps the author’s way of dealing with her own grief over the death of her father, the novelist Peter Straub (this remains one of the most moving and appropriate pieces on grief over the death of your father that I’ve read).
Alice is a woman on the verge of turning 40 years old. She isn’t unhappy with her life – but she also wonders if there are other paths she could or perhaps even SHOULD have explored in her life. She was raised by a single father after her mother left their family when she was a young child. She and her father have always had a loving, if peripheral relationship. They share an interest in books and are in many ways ideal roommates through her teenage years. On her 40th birthday, she realizes they have another connection – the ability to time travel from a specific point in their backyard shed.
Alice explores different ways to alter her future, but truly her primary goal is to find a way to have more time with her father. And there’s the heart of the novel – just a beautiful means of exploring what it feels like to anticipate the death of someone so important to you, you cannot even articulate what their loss will mean.
The novel is quirky, and the time travel element is quite light – it’s not really a sci-fi novel, just a very slight dose of magical realism. Truly it is about friendship, and building families, and how we process what we mean to one another. Alice’s emotional journey was so worth the investment.