Processing the Suicide of a Dear Friend
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I guess I have been living under a rock because I don’t know Sloane Crosley’s work at all. Wikipedia gives us these highlights:
- Her first book was a collection of essays called, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, published in 2008. It was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. It was also optioned by HBO.
- Her second collection of essays came out in 2010. How Did You Get This Number was also a New York Times bestseller.
- Her debut novel, The Clasp, was published in 2015. It was optioned by Universal Pictures.
- Another book of essays, Look Alive Out There, was published in 2018. It too was a Thurber Prize finalist.
- A second novel, Cult Classic, was published in 2022. It was named a best book of the year by: The Washington Post, the BBC, Esquire, The Times of London, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle.
She has also published or edited stories in a long list of very impressive publications, and is an adjunct professor in the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University. The credential that brings her to the current book, Grief Is for People (2024), was the nine years she spent as Deputy Director of Publicity at Vintage/Anchor Books, a division of Random House.
Please note that she has accomplished all of this at the ripe old age of 45. She was born August 3, 1978.
To tell a bit about Grief Is for People, it is a memoir in which the author tries to process the suicide of a colleague – and very dear friend – Russell Perreault. He was the Executive Director of Publicity and Social Media for Vintage Books. He died on July 27, 2019 at the age of fifty-three.
An oddity in the situation is that exactly one month before his death, Sloane Crosley’s apartment in New York was broken into and jewelry that had belonged to her not-very-nice, not-very-beloved grandmother was stolen. That event was a stark delineation in her life. It ushered in a year of loss: the jewelry, Russell, the soon-to-come pandemic.
Of course, she tells us in detail of how her friendship with Russell began and grew. And through all of her stories, I felt her pain, but I did not always understand her analogies. As she describes the idyllic years of their early friendship for example, she tells of weekends at Russel’s house in Connecticut stating, “From 2002 to 2010, we lived in a Terrence McNally play by way of Metro-North.” Hmmm…what does that mean?
But as she tried to figure out what happened in Russell’s life that could lead to suicide, those were contemporary publishing references I could understand. And so that section was enthralling. The first blow came when he was the publicist for A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. The “memoir” was published in 2003 and was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2005. Ultimately, however, James Frey admitted that many parts of the book were fabricated, changing it from a memoir into a semi-fictional novel and winning him Oprah’s ire in the process. She confronted Frey on live TV in 2006. Let’s just say it was a bad time for the book’s publisher.
Sloane Crosley also tells stories of Russell’s behavior that she says were fine in one era and not so fine in a newer one.
- He once said an editor was “dressed like a flight attendant on Provincetown Airline.”
- When Sloane Crosley’s assistant wore a cardigan with a row of overworked buttons, Russell commented: “It’s like you marched into Talbots and said, give me the sluttiest thing you have!”
- And he repeatedly remarked about Sloane Crosley’s wardrobe choices by asking if she got dressed in the dark.
I’m not sure all of these are benign, but they ultimately caught up with him. Though he was a gay man, a straight woman filed a claim against him for “sexual harassment, basically.” Evidently, other such complaints followed and might be a part of the explanation for his eventual suicide.
Overall, the author paints a picture of a very dear friend who was a very unique man with an impressive career. Looking him up online, I found an announcement of his death on the Penguin/Random House website. It mentions his work with many famous authors including Joan Didion, Michael Ondaatje, Sister Helen Prejean, Erik Larson, EL James, Cheryl Strayed, and Chris Bohjalian.
Clearly, his career was as amazing as Sloane Crosley’s, and I am glad to have learned about both of them through this memoir.
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Click here to learn more about Grief Is for People on Amazon.
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