The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Grieving the loss of a best friend
After the death of her confidante, novelist will make you miss him, too.
“What gets old but never ages?” Russell Perreault, the best friend of the novelist and essayist Sloane Crosley, once asked her. The answer to the riddle was jewelry; specifically, the heirloom jewelry Crosley had inherited from her grandmother, the lot of which was stolen from her Manhattan apartment.
But Perreault’s question also suggested an implicit contrast, which is evoked even more forcefully by the title of the memoir in which he now appears, “Grief Is for People.” Jewelry may pass from hand to hand – and occasionally pass into the hands of intrepid thieves – but it endures. People, those fragile and ephemeral assemblages, do not.
It was June 2019 when Crosley came home from a brief errand to find her bedroom in shambles. She was missing a great deal of “unremarkable loot,” along with two precious pieces: her grandmother’s “amber amulet, the size of an apricot, as well as her green cocktail ring, a dome with tiers of tourmaline.” Despite Crosley’s title, she does grieve these items, though not because she bears any special affection toward the woman who left them to her. Rather, the burglary comes to matter so immensely as “a dark gift of delineation,” an event entwined with the beginning of a much more painful ending.
Just a month after the break-in, when Perreault died by suicide at 52, the jewelry became a talisman, a portal to a happier past. In Crosley’s sadness-addled mind, the two losses were linked, the burglary a sickening prelude to the death. She thought to herself, “If I can get these items back, I can get my friend back.” When she has the amulet and ring in hand again, “everything will be just as it used to be.”
What was Perreault to Crosley? Most legibly he was her boss: They met when he hired her to work as a publicist at Vintage Books, where he was the executive director of publicity. By the time Crosley quit years later to pursue a fulltime writing career, Perreault had not graduated to any category that society seemed to recognize as central; in one of the self-help books Crosley perused in her desperation, she found chapters titled “Loss of a Spouse,” “Loss of a Child,” “Adult Loss of a Parent,” “Adult Loss of a Sibling” and so on. In the support groups she joined online, she felt like an impostor as she chatted with a man whose twin children both died by suicide.
But Crosley’s tie with Perreault was undeniable, and she describes it with surprising and winning metaphors. “Ours was the kind of partnership that felt transferable,” she writes. “Give us a designer’s discount and we will decorate your house. Give us some forceps and we will deliver your baby. Give us adjoining desks and we will crack your case.” In short, they were best friends, and “Grief Is for People” is a moving and much-needed tribute to this vital but often unsung human relationship.
If Crosley’s descriptions of love for Perreault are often dazzling and unexpected, her meditations on grief are occasionally clichéd. But bromides are par for the course when it comes to bereavement, and this, too, is part of the indignity of loss. “I am disgusted by the universal truths of grief, by the platitudes,” Crosley laments. “I don’t want to make my way through the coming stages, however ill-defined.” Still, she is sympathetic to the self-help guides she reads, and the five chapters of “Grief Is for People” are organized according to the stages of grief, a tacit admission of their usefulness.
Grief may follow a familiar path in every instance, but Russell Perreault himself was fiercely original, and Crosley paints a vivid and moving portrait of a singularity – a man who signed up for catalogs using his dogs’ names and wrote Crosley emails from an address he created for her cat. He was sharp, funny, unsentimental and given to light chiding of those he loved.
He was a believer in “the souls of objects,” a lifelong collector and an expert haggler at flea markets, but he was also a borderline hoarder who “insisted on keeping old mattresses on the porch” and refused to dispose of a “rusted cocktail shaker,” even when his partner begged him to do so.
His antics in the office – his pranks, his love of gossip – did not endear him to all of his colleagues. Although he was a gay man, he was accused by a straight female colleague of what Crosley describes as “sexual harassment, basically,” a charge she concedes has merit: He once loudly joked Crosley was a “toothless hooker” because she declined to get coffee with him. These mordant remarks did not go over well in the rapidly shifting climate of the publishing house.
Still, he was “pathologically social and abrasively generous.” Crosley and her colleagues spent weekends at his house in Connecticut on a porch “strewn with disemboweled newspapers, overflowing ashtrays, strings of corn silk, plates of half-eaten toast.”
Crosley’s book is not a philosophical meditation on grief but an honest account of its cruelties and contradictions. It contains no lessons, no morals and no solutions. It is not didactic. It is as messy, rollicking and chaotic as life is. By the end of the book, Crosley misses Perreault as consumingly as she did on the day of his death. “My grief for you will always remain unruly,” she tells him. There can be no compensation for the ache of it.
Yet “Grief Is for People” is not only or even primarily a sad book. When a woman who could not obtain a job anywhere had an informational interview with Perreault, he told her: “You’re not fun. This is a seven-person department. I have to live with you.” “Fun” was his foremost criterion, and by this metric, Crosley’s book is a roaring success.
Crosley holds Perreault in her heart with humor and humanity, and although she emphasizes that writing is not a consolation or an act of therapy, it is nonetheless a testament. In a way, she recovers Russell not by recovering her stolen jewelry but by gifting him to all of us and preserving him in a more indelible sort of amber. Books, too, get old without aging, at least if they are as abiding as this one is.