Letitia | Bookshelfbyla's Reviews > Grief Is for People

my emotions reading : 🥺🤣😓🥰🤧🫨
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“I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking”

‘Grief Is For People’ by Sloane Crosley is not your typical grief story. Sloane takes us through a difficult period of loss in her life where she was burglarized and one month later lost her closest friend to suicide. These distinct events are smartly intertwined and told with her unique spin on the stages of her grief to create an emotional, funny, and honest story.

This isn’t a dark book. It feels weird to say I enjoyed it, yet I did. But not enjoyment the same way you enjoy a romantic beach read. It's enjoyable in the way of having a heavy and revealing heart-to-heart with a close friend.

Death is often spoken in hush tones. When mentioned many react as if you just said a huge disgusting spoiler to life despite it being one of the few facts of all our lives. But this fact doesn’t lessen the pain when it does happen, and it is a unique pain when someone does it of their own free will.

The humor in the story allows room for the complicated, sad and non-linear emotions that Sloane experiences to be felt without leaving you depressed. This wasn’t funny in a gimmicky way but in a helpful refresher that as much as life can be sad, it can also be funny. And people are not the summation of their final moments. Sloane's inclusion of the sliver of her moments shared with Russell and some of the moments due to her burglary added color to keep it from being a bleak story.

A necessary life reminder “it’s not such a nice world. Bad things happen. Sometimes they happen all at once”. But if you don’t sink, you find a way to swim.

I underlined many lines — some for their cleverness, humor, and relatability. Already an NYT Bestseller, and deservedly so.

Thank you FSG/MCD for the gifted copy! I’m now 2/2 with Sloane. The epigraph is a fitting note to end on...

“Either you jump out the window or you live”