The Booksmith is so excited to be welcoming Sloane Crosley to the shop for the paperback release of Grief Is for People. She'll be in-conversation with author R.O. Kwon. Please join us! RSVP is not required, but appreciated. Seats are limited and can be guaranteed with the purchase of a book.

See you at the shop!

About the book

Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, TIME, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Esquire, NPR, Elle, Library Journal, LitHub, Oprah Daily, Publishers Weekly, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, Bookpage, The Independent, and New Statesman

Disarmingly witty and poignant, Sloane Crosley’s memoir explores multiple kinds of loss following the death of her closest friend.

How do we live without the ones we love? After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Sloane Crosley looks for answers in philosophy and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.

For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, Sloane’s apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.

When Russell dies exactly one month later, his death propels Sloane on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll of the pandemic.

Sloane Crosley’s search for truth is frank, wickedly funny, and gilded with resounding empathy. Upending the “grief memoir,” Grief Is for People is a story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A contemporary elegy, it rises to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.

About the authors

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling books  Grief Is for People, How Did You Get This Number, and I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a 2009 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor). She is also the author of Look Alive Out There (a 2019 finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor) and the novels, Cult Classic and The Clasp. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She has been featured in The Library of America's 50 Funniest American Writers, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best American Travel Writing, Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay and others. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, her work has appeared in various publications including The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue and The Guardian. She has been an adjunct professor in Columbia University’s MFA program and a guest teacher at Dartmouth College and The Yale Writers’ Workshop. She lives in New York City.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling novel Exhibit, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, was named a best book of the year by more than forty publications and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon coedited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.