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I Wrote a Memoir About Grief. That Was the Beginning.

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“There’s nothing traditional or twice-cooked about Crosley’s voice, her arresting observations . . . Throughout, Crosley cites Joan Didion, whose two personal books on grief, The Year Of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, she obviously sees as a touchstone for her own. To me, Grief Is for People is every bit their equal in eloquence, intensity and toughness.”

— NPR

“[Crosley’s] 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 . . . [Crosley is] offering us a look into [Perreault’s] life through the lens of her love, pain and admiration. Telling us, with precision and generosity, how it might be when it is our turn to remember what was true about those we’ve lost.”

— New York Times Book Review on Grief Is for People

“Not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. [Grief Is for People] contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic...A moving and much-needed tribute to this vital but often unsung relationship...Crosley’s book is a roaring success.”

— Washington Post

“[An] aching meditation on loss and friendship…Crosley elegantly links the two losses by explaining how her fevered desire to reclaim her burglarized items stood in for her inability to reclaim Russell. Her characteristically whip-smart prose takes on a newly introspective quality as she reinvigorates dusty publishing memoir tropes and captures the minutiae of a complicated friendship with humor and heart. This is a must-read. ”

— Publishers Weekly starred review for Grief Is for People

“At once acerbic and poignant, Cult Classic’s tour through heartbreaks past yields bittersweet truths about finding love by swipe. It’s as fine a treatise on modern romance as they come.”

— Esquire

“A witty and fantastical story of dating and experimental psychology in New York City...thoroughly hilarious [and] sharply perceptive. Crosley has found the perfect fictional subject for her gimlet eye.”

— Publishers Weekly starred review for Cult Classic

“Crosley has created the ideal protagonist/narrator for navigating this low-key-SF but very real world...The story is plenty engaging, but it’s Crosley’s analytical acumen and gift for the striking metaphor that really gives the book life. Thoughtfully and humanely acerbic.”

— Kirkus Reviews starred review for Cult Classic

“A marvel . . . The latest collection from the Manhattan-based essayist suggests she can write engagingly about nearly anything . . . All [the essays] work on multiple levels and all are sharply written, as Crosley continues to extend her impressive range.”

— Kirkus Reviews starred review for Look Alive Out There

“Crosley has achieved a rare feat: a complex and clever work of homage that deepens the original by connecting it to contemporary life. The Clasp is a gentle, astute, funny, smart, and very entertaining book.”

— The New Republic

“Crosley is like a tap-dancer, lighthearted and showmanlike…but capable of surprising you with the reserves of emotion and keen social observation.”

— New York Times Book Review on How Did You Get This Number

“Crosley’s book [is] a welcome departure from the increasingly tired genre of first-person prose as stand-up comedy. Unlike David Sedaris (I went to Anne Frank’s house and all I got was real-estate lust!) and other hugely successful practitioners, Crosley forces herself up against not her exquisite selfishness but some ideal she’s grasping for—female camaraderie, neighborliness, sanity. She’s also got a sharp fizzily old-fashioned sense of the madcap that, in the best pieces, has you thinking that she’s figured out how to cross Mary Tyler Moore with Kingsley Amis.”

— Elle Magazine on I Was Told There'd Be Cake

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestselling books Grief Is for People (FSG/MCD, 2024), named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews; How Did You Get This Number (Riverhead, 2010); and I Was Told There’d Be Cake (Riverhead, 2008), a 2009 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. She is also the author of Look Alive Out There (FSG/MCD, 2018), a New York Times Editors' Choice and 2019 finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and the novels Cult Classic (FSG/MCD, 2022) and The Clasp (Picador, 2016), both of which she has adapted for film.

Crosley wrote the foreword to Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28, a McNally Editions collection of Dorothy Parker columns, and the introduction to The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. She was the editor of the 2011 edition of Best Travel Writing and co-edited Sad Stuff on the Street with Greg Larson.

She has been featured in the Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best American Travel Writing, and Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay. She has been a columnist for The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Independent, Departures, Black Book, and The New York Observer. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Vogue.

In an interview about Grief Is for People, she was asked if, as a humor writer whose fans include comedic voices such as David Sedaris, Steve Martin, and John Mulaney, it was difficult to write about heavy subject matter. She replied, “I include various philosophers from Durkheim to Camus. I also quote Joan Didion. But there’s a levity as well—references to things like The Neverending Story. That’s just how I think about tragedy and comedy. I have sometimes wished the mechanism with which I view the world was a little more earnest, with a more poetic quality to it, but in place of those qualities, I have humorous analogies. It’s how I throw the world into relief. That’s going to be the same no matter what material you give me.”

A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and Yaddo Fellow, she has also been an adjunct professor in Columbia University’s MFA program and The New School’s MFA program, as well as a visiting teacher at Dartmouth College, the Yale Writers’ Workshop, School of Visual Arts, New York University, and Sarah Lawrence College.

She lives in New York City.

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“Potent and propulsive, a lyrical meditation on loss and what comes after. Grief Is for People is heartbreaking and wholly original.”

— Tara Westover

“I have come to rely on Sloane Crosley for her oyster knife humor, bourbon hot observation, and indelible portraits of how we live with each other in this constantly shifting world. Grief Is for People is about how we live without the ones we love. Crosley brings her whole self to this memoir—her gifts, her flaws, her intellect, and emotion. She loves hard, grieves hard, and writes with the beauty and urgency of a white hot star. I wish I didn’t ‘get’ this book as much as I do. What a gift that she kept her wit intact through all-consuming loss. Grief Is for People is the book I didn’t know I needed to read.”

— Tayari Jones