Sloane Crosley on Staying on the Side of the Living

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Sloane Crosley about her new memoir, Grief is for People.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: How did you know when you were writing this that you were done, because obviously, this is an ongoing conversation with yourself in the world about what happened and you’re not going to be just like, Okay, I’m better?

Sloane Crosley: Thanks for saying that. It’s not actually intuitive for a lot of people. I think people do confuse, as I say, in the book, the written word with a final word a lot, but I do see it as this sort of evolving thing. But the real stage, I suppose, as opposed to the sort of artificial stages and the structure, was recognizing, truly, that I had to be on the side of the living. That I could keep Russell with me, and not be so loyal to him above my own life and moving forward within it. It’s how I treat other people, and just try to remember that this is painful, but this actually did not happen to me. This happened to my friend. And just that feeling of not wanting to go down with the ship is how the book, without spoiling it, ends. It’s hard to articulate it, but it seemed like a big moment for me in terms the very end of the book which faces a different direction.

Mitzi Rapkin: And so when you understood that yourself, you knew you could let the book go like that book was going to be ready?

Sloane Crosley: Yes. And I think what’s funny about it is if you look at other grief memoirs, they’re all about the same length. The very few of them are more than like 250 pages. That would be a real shock. Most of them are little babies. I mean, Max Porter, that’s a novel but it’s also a baby book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers. And then both of the Didion memoirs, and Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, they’re just not that long. There must be something about what the mind can sort of sustain imaginatively about a person. Perhaps you just get exhausted by conjecture about that person. And then maybe you just have a sense that, well, I’m not going to drag the reader down with me and exhaust this mythical person as well. The roulette wheel sort of stops, but what’s the what’s the right place to stop? For me, it was the recognition that I could be as kind to people who were still here as I was to Russell. That maybe I could be that way to myself as well.

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