Grief Is The Thing With Feathers: Sloane Crosley on friendship, loss, mourning, and Flaco the owl.

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, I’m talking with author Sloane Crosley. Best known for her humorous and existentially probing essays, Sloane’s latest book is a departure of sorts. Grief Is For People, a memoir, covers the year in her life following the death of Russell Perreault, a veteran of book publishing who’d been her boss before becoming her closest friend. A month before Russell’s death, Sloane’s apartment was burglarized by a jewel thief, turning her into an amateur detective as she attempted to retrieve family heirlooms while reckoning with loss across several dimensions.

Sloane worked as a book publicist for many years before being an author herself, and in this conversation, she talks about how office culture has changed over the last decade, especially in the wake of #MeToo, and what it was like to work with famous authors like Joan Didion and Sandra Cisneros in the final glory days of publishing. Meghan and Sloane also explore the phenomenon of collective grief over animals that become symbols of something much larger: for instance, the response to the death a few months ago of Flaco, the Eurasian owl that got out of a zoo enclosure and flew around upper Manhattan for more than a year, captivating not just the New Yorkers who saw him in real life but people all over the world following his whereabouts on social media.

GUEST BIO

Sloane Crosley is the author of two novels and three essay collections, including the bestsellers I Was Told They’re Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number? Her new book is the memoir Grief Is For People. She lives in New York City.

You can buy her new book here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	He was completely beloved.
0:05.9	So again, this is like a kind of person that doesn't fit neatly into the categories of the cancelable categories, I suppose.
0:12.2	He was completely beloved, but like a wild animal in a cage at work.
0:16.0	Like that's not someone who even should have been in an office at the end.
0:21.5	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom. Quick note before we get started,
0:27.4	you've heard me talk about it before, but I'll remind you again, the unspeak-easy is doing a
0:32.1	co-ed retreat in Chicago, June 4th and 5th. It's not an overnight. Sorry, just daytime only, but it's going to be
0:41.6	great and our guest speakers have been announced. They include Nadine Straussen, prominent free speech
0:48.2	advocate, former president of the ACLU, before the ACLU went insane. Nadine will be joining us. We will also be
0:57.3	joined by Eric Smith, who is a professor of rhetorics. He is one of the co-founders and he's the
1:03.8	president of Free Black Thought. He's been on this podcast a couple of times. And Lisa Selen Davis,
1:10.0	the author of many books and she writes a lot about
1:13.7	gender, and you've heard her on this show as well. So if you want to get in on that, go to the unspeakeasy.com,
1:19.7	check out our retreats, go to Chicago, and apply. You do have to apply, because I need to make sure
1:26.2	you're not insane. So everybody has a good
1:28.9	time, which they always do. Okay, my guest is author Sloan Crosley. Sloan is a much adored and
1:36.3	much celebrated writer. She's probably best known for her humorous, but existentially probing
1:42.6	personal essays. Her collections, I was told there'd be cake,
1:47.0	and how did you get this number, were bestsellers. She's also the author of two novels.
1:52.2	She has a new book out, her sixth book, and it's a memoir. It's called Grief is for People,
1:57.6	and it covers a year in her life following the death of a very close friend,
2:02.6	as well as a burglary that occurred in her apartment. It also, without coming out and saying as much,
	...

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