If a book came with a list of ingredients like a package of peanuts, Grief Is for People (Sloane Crosley) would rate highly for substance, even while blending that substance with wit and thoughtfulness. It’s fitting “people” is in the title, as anyone who has experienced grief can relate to the writing here: “To mourn the death of a friend is to feel as if you are walking around with a vase, knowing you have to set it down but nowhere is obvious.”

I’ve appreciated her books of essays before (with great titles like I Was Told There’d Be Cake) and haven’t yet read her fiction, but I suspect this is her most profound book, in the form of a moving tribute to a close friend who died by suicide, even as that experience quite closely followed a break-in, and a thief taking irreplaceable jewelry from her home. The jewelry is not given as much importance, but considering a close friend would have seen and known some of that jewelry, there are certain connections.

In an age we seem determined (perhaps, strongly influenced, but that’s a whole other conversation) to divide ourselves any number of ways, I see this book as one that appeals to our commonalities: “What you can do is be careful with other people. Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps this is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse – delicate things made out of solid materials.”

My mother died suddenly of heart failure when I was in my twenties and the world, naturally, carried on that same moment. I was already writing, but it motivated me to capture things, to get them down on paper, and give language the kind of elegance it rarely displays. Crosley weaves an emotionally detailed account of the months and years following these personal events including the way we are forced to carry on, moving away from the details of a life (“By living, I am, by default, leaving him”) with the pandemic and a suddenly quieter New York like some kind of curtain dropping after all of it.

Securely among great American writers, Joan Didion wrote movingly about grief when she lost her husband (The Year of Magical Thinking) and her daughter (Blue Nights), and I think this book by Crosley matches those others. It’s an impressive tribute to a friend (we should all be so lucky) and as relatable as it is articulate, but it’s also our most undeniable proof (if anyone needed it) Crosley is a profound and extraordinary writer.