A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

Unlike anything Joyce Carol Oates has written before, A Widow’s Story is the universally acclaimed author's poignant, intimate memoir about the unexpected death of Raymond Smith, her husband of forty-six years, and its wrenching, surprising aftermath. A recent recipient of National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, Oates, whose novels (Blonde, The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Little Bird of Heaven, etc.) rank among the very finest in contemporary American fiction, offers an achingly personal story of love and loss. A Widow’s Story is a literary memoir on a par with The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and Calvin Trillin’s About Alice.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Grief, Biography Memoir, Death, Womens

432 pages, Hardcover

First published February 15, 2011

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Clay]

I requested a galley of Joyce Carol Oates' "A Widow's Story, a Memoir", because, as an author who was also some years ago widowed, I thought it might speak to me, and it certainly has, in more ways than I could ever have imagined.

There are a lot of grief books, a number written by widows, but none tells the raw truth of grief and loss like this one, how close to insanity grief feels--is, perhaps--and for a very long time too; how savage, precarious, shattering and lazy grief is, until, at some time--which can hardly come soon enough/takes what seems like forever--grief attenuates, or usually attenuates anyway, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the widow.

The great irony is that I could hardly have read a book like this one when I was going through my own loss, quite different than Ms. Oates' and yet in many ways much the same. My concentration was wrecked. I couldn't read much of anything for a very long time. But I think for those who can read it, whenever they are able, it will ring both terribly and comfortingly true. Aside from Ms. Oates' personal story, this seems to me also an important book, because what it says, among so many other things, is: This is the harrowing way grief is, how you and those around you will be and feel and behave, for better or worse, sometimes much worse. Hardly anyone tells you this, or even knows it to tell you, and it's important information, news I received gratefully years ago, when a few knowing people were good enough to tell me.

I am a dozen years past the worst of my own experience and happily remarried, but even so, I've lost several days reading this ARC, nodding, crying Yes!, shaking my head, laughing, empathizing, turning to my new(ish) husband to say: This is exactly the way it was!

Highly recommended.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must admit, I do take a bit of an issue of a book like this being rated and ranked, because it is a tale of pain as Joyce Carol Oates comes to terms with her grief, finding herself now alone, without her lifeline. How can one rate and review the pain of another and how another grieved? Particularly, or maybe especially, if one has not suffered a terrible loss themselves? Despite whether people feel she was being mean-spirited, disjointed, or maybe even a little cold, people react to loss differently and even if there is a common loss shared between two people, the way they experience that loss is always going to be different. In reading reviews for this book (on both GoodReads and Amazon), I found some of the projections that people were making on how they would handle things in comparison to how JCO dealt with her grief a little disturbing and, at times, without any real merit.

Although I have not suffered the death of a spouse, I have lived through the death of a child and of both of my parents. While reading this book, I was able to really connect with JCO as she traveled the long and lonely world of grief. The grief she writes about, her actions, her disbelief, the feelings of being numb, of feeling lost, of not knowing what to do, of trying to move forward and of being cemented to the ground, anchored because you are afraid if you move on, you will forget -- is amazing, heartbreaking, and true to life. Trying to decide where to bury someone, what kind of ceremony it should include, having to navigate through the paperwork, dealing with people who haven't experienced what you just had, and not really feeling like things have changed, knowing they have, and not being able to deal with them -- this is what death is like for someone left behind.

And trying to find the way to cope: whether it is through writing, getting on the internet and meeting total strangers, going back to work right away, or trying to just find a way to make it through the day.

While I have always been a fan of JCO's fiction, this book humanized her, in all of her good qualities and bad, in her triumphs, trials, and complete failures.

The things she recalls about certain days, the small details like getting a parking ticket, the way the nurse looked at her, the cats misbehavior - I related so well, because those are how you mark the days. It is with those small details that when everything else feels so surreal, you are brought back to reality and realize the loss really happened, you are really experiencing this, and this is really your life.

I highly commend JCO for sharing that vulnerability with others. Grieving and death is looked upon oddly in our society, especially in comparison with other cultures, and for JCO to be very honest about it, to not romanticize about it, and to say, "Hey, I'm not ok. This has left me lost. What do I do now?" is refreshing. This book, along with C.S Lewis' A Grief Observed, are probably the most honest books about life, love, death, and loss.

I highly recommend reading it without prejudice and projection, especially for those that have experienced a loss of their own. It is hauntingly comforting.

[Kimber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oates' writing style, so readable that she makes the slightest most ordinary event of profound interest. Not just a tale of the experience of grief. It is more revealing about JCO and what she is like as a person. After reading "them," I couldn't help feeling like "Who could write like this?" and "What is this person like in real life?" I guess I thought she must be this confident woman who is such a great writer, I wasn't expecting her to have such low self-esteem, such self-loathing. She even seems to blame herself for his death, which I guess is part of the mourning process. As with her dark characters, she allows herself to be fully seen here, warts and all,but you can also feel what a traumatic experience it is to lose a spouse, something you're never ready for.

[Melinda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Ca... ) wrote this book after the sudden and unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith in 2008 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_... ). They had been married 47 years, she was 70 and he was 78. As other writers that I have read, the author uses her writing as a way to deal with the shock of death. She writes very skillfully and with great mastery. If you have ever known a widow, then you will recognize the crushing grief combined with the need to take care of the next task. Copies of the death certificate are needed for everything. Probating the will. Paying the bills. Taking out the trash. Well meaning friends send baskets of fruit and sausage and cheese. People offer to help, but they do not know what the widow needs, and the widow cannot communicate what she needs because of the crushing sorrow she is experiencing. Re-living the final hours. Re-thinking the final decisions. Writing thank you cards or choosing not to write thank you cards. First conversations with strangers who do not know your husband has died.

While reading this book, it struck me that Joyce Carol Oates must never have had any friends who were widows. Has she never offered friendship or love to someone crushed by sorrow? It seems not. She and her husband had no children, and it seems no close family. Friends did come to stand in the gap, but the majority of her book seems spent in alone times. There is no "where is he now?" or "will I see him again?". Death is final, the end. There is no hope of seeing Ray again, no hope of anything after death. No wonder she is crushed and contemplates suicide.

The irony about JCO is that she is a very prolific writer of fiction, yet her husband Ray never read any of her fiction. None. They were both writers, although Ray left writing to become an editor, and yet she never shared her fiction writing with him. And it seems that he did not share his writing with her either. After Ray's death, JCO pulls out a book that Ray had been writing in the early years of their marriage but never finished. He told her that he had written most of it before their marriage and then set it aside when he turned to editing over writing. She begins to read "Black Mass", and discovers many things about Ray she never knew. The book is semi-autobiographical. Ray was from a very devout Irish Roman Catholic family. He even entered Roman Catholic seminary as his father had hopes that he would become a priest. But Ray has a nervous breakdown and leaves seminary and leaves the Roman Catholic Church and becomes estranged from his family. Ray's nervous breakdown has roots in the treatment his older sister received when she rebelled against the strict Roman Catholic upbringing. She eventually was lobotomized and then institutionalized. Ray witnessed all of this as a young child. Ray also bears the burden of his father's terror of not doing "enough" to warrant entrance into heaven. Ray's father pressures him to become a priest because having a priest in the family would be "good" and that would ensure Ray's father a closer chance of acceptance and approval in the Roman Catholic Church. When Ray rejects this path, his father literally becomes terrified that his salvation is in jeopardy. What a horrible burden of guilt to place on your child! And no wonder he fled from his family. What I feel is most tragic about this is that JCO knew none of this during her 47 year marriage to Ray. She was simply content to accept Ray into her family and never extend friendship or love to Ray's family.

Her success by the end of the book (and I must confess that I skimmed the last 1/3rd of the book, it is almost 400 pages long!) is that she has survived the year after Ray's death. That is the high point of the book. I heard the author say that at some point she wanted to call her book "A Widow's Handbook", but based on her own experience she would not have read it. Then to whom is she writing? I have read other widows and widowers write about their grief at the death of their spouse, and those people seem to have written from positions of hope that lead them out of despair eventually into an understanding of their suffering. JCO points only to THE END. No hope. Her grief has no purpose. As such, why read her book? While she writes well, she instructs poorly. The example she provides is selfish and narrow, grasping merely for survival and accepting that there really is no meaning in her grief. If you must read about life as a widow, there are many other books to turn to that are written just as well (or better) and contain wisdom, something JCO's book has none of.

In an effort to provide a bit of contrast, I thought about books that would be worth reading from those who had been there, and done more than just survive but point to hope. I thought of three people: C.S. Lewis, Kathleen Norris, and Elisabeth Elliot. Here is a bit of information about each person, and the book they wrote to make sense of the grief they experienced.

C.S. Lewis wrote "A Grief Observed" after the death of his wife, Joy. Lewis struggles every bit as violently with his grief as JCO does with hers, but at the end he recognizes that there is something beyond him and his own grief, and in that "something beyond" there is hope. Lewis says, "God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down."

Kathleen Norris wrote "Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life". (see my review at http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ). Norris is also an accomplished writer, as is Joyce Carol Oates, yet Norris also struggles with the death of her husband yet emerges as more than just having survived.

Elisabeth Elliot wrote "The Path of Loneliness: Finding Your Way through the Wilderness to God". After experiencing the sudden death of her first husband Jim Elliot in 1956 on the mission field in Ecuador when he was murdered, she marries a second time to Addison Leitch and then helps her husband through hard years of agonizing cancer until his death in 1973. Currently married to Lars Gren, Elisabeth Elliot's book on understanding grief comes with hope and joy.
(see http://www.elisabethelliot.org/about.... and
http://www.amazon.com/Path-Loneliness... )

So seek wisdom from those who have proved themselves wise. I'd avoid foolishness, and thus would avoid Joyce Carol Oates "A Widow's Story: A Memoir".

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the story of how novelist Joyce Carol Oates lost her husband unexpectedly to a secondary infection he acquired while in the hospital. She was 70 (?), he was 77.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. I read the first half quite quickly; it was highly emotional, and highly engaging. Around the half-way point though, it was simply exhausting and redundant, even melodramatic. It may sound caustic and unfeeling, but her voice is SO highly charged that it began to sound as though she were screeching her way through the narrative, and at times it was difficult to take her seriously.

I'm surprised that Oates wrote this book, because it is not very flattering. Her grief is such that it cannot be considered normal or natural. Rather, it stems from a co-dependent relationship that left her unable to function as an individual, separate and apart from the entity that was "Ray-and-Joyce" for nearly fifty years. This book would actually be a very useful case study of co-dependency, the inability to distinguish where one person ends and the other begins. What's so sad is that Oates doesn't see this, and chose to share it with the world. It exposes her too much, I think, and I felt embarrassed for her.

If you know the rest of the story, you know that Oates remarried less than a year after her husband's passing. This, too, speaks volumes about her lack of self-efficacy. I saw a piece in Newsweek a few weeks back where well-known people, including Oates, were asked what they thought of some new gadget. It was not insignificant that she replied, "My husband Charlie . . . " She seems to define her experience through her relation to another, her intimate "other." It's no wonder, then, that when "my husband died; my world collapsed," as she writes early on in the book.

This book also supports a theory that I have that when people who live blessed, near-perfect lives get older, they have a much harder time coping with any sort of setback or loss that life sends their way. They have never honed the vital skills of resiliency and resourcefulness. They simply don't know how to survive the storms of life that others have weathered time and again.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to rate; as a 'grief-memoir' the book is raw and very emotional. But oh my, it also reveals a person that I started to dislike quite a bit...

[Charles Bechtel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in one sitting. I was struck more as a writer than as a widower, something I daily dread becoming, by this idea: a primary repetitive act of any novelist is to invent, word by word, sentence by sentence. Failing the power to invent, a novelist may turn to what she can recall and massage that until she has what will stand in for what she wanted invented. One of the most striking characteristics of Ms. Oates work is that she invents so often, so well, and so clearly. Looking over how much she has put onto pages it seems almost impossible to imagine she even had life to mine, for she must have spent almost the whole portion of it at a keyboard or holding a pen.

Then comes this book. From first to last, nothing is invented. I am sure of it. Nothing has the tinge of cleverness that even the greatest of fiction writers can expunge from their work. Nothing seems massaged, nothing reworked, nothing hardly even processed by the kind of cogitation one puts words through before allowing them to remain on the page. Every word, memory, description seems to hit us like blood drops from a wounded beast who will die, will not recover, will not ever again run. And now that I have read this, I can feel my own blood pumping, hear the circadian rhythms of my own life in my ears, and can't help but feel acutely temporary as I sit across from my wife, who reads a fantasy in a chair opposite me.

This is not a book into which we disappear, which is mostly the point of all fictions. Into this I appear. I am too faint of heart ever to read it again, and too fearful I may one day live it.

[Kathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Since this is a memoir it is difficult to separate the author from the quality of her writing. Perhaps this is a well written book. But as a person I could find nothing about her to respect. I do believe her loss was the greatest pain she ever suffered but I do not believe her pain supercedes all other pain anyone else has suffered by being widowed, divorced or beling alone. I found her to be weak, oh so needy, a name-dropper, completely self-absorbed, disdainful, mean-spirited and rude.

For me the most offensive part was the section she devoted to ranting and complaining about any kindness extended by others. She was offended and completely undone by any verbal expressions of sympathy offered. She lets us all know that many of the flowers, food and gift baskets ended up carmmed in her trash cans. She complained because the trash cans were so full she couldn't get the lids on and about the burden of having so many dead flower petals on her dining room floor. She shuddered whenever she saw another delivery van coming to her door. She is even burdened by all the sympathy cards she received. They were stuffed in a tote bag unopened. Later when she tried to read them she just couldn't bear to.

In less than a year after her husband died she has remarried.

Reading her memoir was like spending a large chunk of time with a woman I neither liked nor respected. I was glad when the ordeal was over.

[Aunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books stands alone in searing memoirs. Not only for widows but for anyone that has lost someone who simply cannot be replaced. The most mundane things are simply too difficult to bear and oftentimes well meaning friends make the journey that much harder. The moments that registered for me were the contemplation of an eternal sleep aided by doctors who tend to treat grieving women as raving banshees to be medicated. Then, of course, the endless bargaining with whatever is out there and in control to bring your loved one back -to have them returned to you if only YOU were good enough. From fainting on the floor to developing an absolute fear of the telephone, Ms. Oates has convinced me that she, too, has walked through the valley of death-sadly leaving a cherished loved one behind. And, for some critics who attempt to "shame" Ms. Oates or question her love for her husband because she remarried a year after he died, I ask that you withhold that judgement until you, yourself have walked in her shoes. Clearly, she loves her first husband and perhaps she is fortunate enough to be blessed with the gift of two great loves. Or, maybe she just didn't want to be alone anymore. It is so deadly quiet there.

[Jannekb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve never cared much for her widely lauded, copious fiction, and I care even less for the frail and foolish person Joyce Smith (pen name Joyce Carol Oates) portrays herself to be in this memoir. When her elderly husband, Raymond Smith, dies suddenly of pneumonia, JCO is left utterly unmoored and writes frequently of feeling suicidal, unloved, and without meaning now that her beloved is gone. While she talks a good game about stockpiling pills and lying in bed wishing to sleep and never wake up, after hundreds of pages of essentially the same series of internal dialogues, even a depressive with compulsive suicidal ideation like myself, who was so very likely to be sympathetic to her travails, is left impatiently thinking - build a bridge and get over it already. JCO then proceeds to unearth her husband’s unfinished, unpublished, and transparently autobiographical novel “Black Mass” which was written in his twenties (he died in his late seventies), and regurgitates portions and plot summaries to the horrified reader - even selections her husband crossed out and clearly did not intend to include. Raymond Smith was an editor by trade, and by all accounts a very talented one. JCO should have trusted his decisions to excise, to withhold, to NOT PUBLISH THIS NOVEL. In presenting the content of “Black Mass,” she boldly and self-righteously airs the dirty laundry of her husband’s Roman Catholic family of origin, a family she and her husband were never close to during their long marriage. Of the Catholic Church and its teaching, she writes, “How ridiculous such notions seem to us. To some of us.” JCO comes across as rude, dismissive, arrogant, and is frequently demeaning of her friends and acquaintances, many of whose expressions and acts of sympathy were apparently merely annoying to her, but she saves her strongest feelings of disdain for Roman Catholics. “We’d agreed, there is no salvation, as there is no need for salvation. The world, like the garden, simply is.” And yet, if she was willing to be saved, to trust in a power greater than herself or her husband or her career, her life might not seem to be, in the end, merely and abjectly casting about in the “inifinite whirl, alone.” Perhaps this is what Godlessness and an outright rejection of familial bonds creates: meaninglessness. Did she expect her seventy-eight year old husband would live forever? Did she never stop to look ahead, to consider the realities of human existence? We are all going to die, sooner or later. This is not a book of tragedy, or survival of tragedy. It tries to be, in one final sentence, but there was no build to that last, false note – aside from brief moments in her husband’s garden, where she believes his spirit resides, but JCO has made it clear that she does not believe in souls and spirits and afterlife, merely the long black silence of not-being. It is not surprising that such a belief system would generate such a long, fruitless, and painfully bitter memoir as this.

[Janice Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Widow's Story
Joyce Carol Oates

I am feeling a bit hesitant to write a Review (with a capital R) of this recently published book by Joyce Carol Oates for I am not qualified to critique her writing, only my heart and mind's reaction to the story she has told. With that caveat, I will share my impressions with you.

I purchased this book because, while I am not a widow, I am interested in how people adjust to life-altering situations; how they feel and what choices they make moving forward. Relationships are fascinating to me as well, particularly long marriages, mother-child, and sibling relationships.

I had read Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking, a few years ago and it sits with all my "favorites"; so I was curious as to how Oates' book might compare. Not in terms of marriage or grief or circumstance, but in terms of a writer opening her heart and culling from the broken bits of it a story based on an individual's reality as relates to perhaps the most important person in her life.

Right from the start in A Widow's Story I loved the words chosen, the flow of the words and the meaning of the sentences. As an editor and reader, I kept finding wonderful sentences that I was tempted to highlight or underline, but did not. I did mark them with a bookmark and share them with you now; this will give you a small glimpse into the content of the book and the style of Oates' writing in this instance.

There is so much more to this book than any brief review can reveal. Like, The Year of Magical Thinking and The House on Teachers' Lane (by Rachel Simon) and, if I might add, Leaving the Hall Light On (by Madeline Sharples and recently published by the company I founded, Lucky Press), A Widow's Story is an individual story, a unique story, that is encased within the universal experience of our lives as modern women, often as one-half of a couple, as people struggling to make sense of family, loss, and our choices as writers. These are books to be kept in one's home library and to read again; to share with friends going through similar experiences, to give as gifts.

Here are a few passages that stood out to me in A Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates (the author uses italics liberally in her writing and I apologize for not incorporating them below, with the exception of book titles, as Goodreads requires cumbersome html formatting just to include italics):

page 74: You made my life possible. I owe my life to you. ¶ I can't do this alone. ¶ And yet--what is the option? The Widow is one who has discovered that there is no option. ... ¶ This determination to manage--to cope--to do as much unassisted as possible--is the Widow's prerogative.

page 122: I am beginning to think Maybe I never knew him, really. Maybe I knew him only superficially--his deeper self was hidden from me. ¶ In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious--unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer's life can be distressing--negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers--disappointment with one's own work, on a daily/hourly basis!--it seemed to me to be a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too? ¶ In this way, I walled off from my husband the part of my life that is "Joyce Carol Oates"--which is to say, my writing career.

page 141: As I read Ray's critical essays of this long-ago time ["Christabel and Geraldine: The Marriage of Life and Death," which appeared in the Bucknell Review in 1968.], I realize how close we'd been ... We had shared every detail of our teaching jobs--our classes, our colleagues, the high points and low points and surprises of our lives... ¶ I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead--head-on, heedlessly one might say--or "fearlessly"-- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of intellectual/literary precocity, I had not experienced much; nor would I experience much until I was well into middle-age--the illnesses and deaths of my parents, this unexpected death of my husband. We play at paste til qualified for pearl says Emily Dickinson. Playing at paste is much of our early lives. And then, with the violence of a door slammed shut by wind rushing through a house, life catches up with us.

page 221: There's an ironic appropriateness to my presentation [in Cleveland, shortly after her husband's death]--"The Writer's 'Secret Life': Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration"--with its focus upon woundedness--especially in childhood. The writers of whom I speak--Samuel Beckett, the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, Sam Clemens, Eugene O'Neill among others--are brilliant examples of individuals who rendered woundedness into art; they are not writers of genius because they were wounded but because, being wounded, they were capable of transmuting their experience into something rich and strange and new and wonderful. Tears spring into my eyes when I quote Ernest Hemingway's stirring remark--it's so profound, I wil quote it ot the audience twice:

"From things that have happened and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason."

page 252: The horror is: one of the books which has been nominated for the [National Book Critics Circle] award is my Journal: 1973-1982. Into which--I've just recently discovered--I can't bring myself to look. ¶ How strange it is to the writer, whose life's-blood would seem to have been drained, in order that works of prose be "animated"--given a semblance of life through printed language--when the writer is obligated to revisit the work, at a later time. Sometimes it's a painful, powerful experience--opening a book, staring down at the lines of print and recalling--in the helpless, vertiginous way in which one recalls, or half-recalls, a lost dream--the emotional state of being you were in, at the time of the writing. ¶ In my case--a "posthumous" case--the feeling is But I was alive then! I remember that.

page 360-361: In marriage, as in any intimate relationship, there are sinkholes ... minefields. ...To Ray there was a sinkhole: his family. ¶ The sinkhole was immense, covering many acres: his family, the Church, hell. ¶ This sinkhole nearly pulled him into it, to drown. Before I'd met him, Ray said. ¶ Or so I'd gathered, as a young wife. ¶ ...In writing this, I feel that I am betraying Ray. Yet in not writing it, I am not being altogether honest.

page 361: Another time, when we'd first met ... Ray had spoken hesitantly of his sister who'd been "institutionalized." ¶ This was a coincidence! For my sister Lynn, eighteen years younger than me, had been institutionalized, too. ¶ So severely autistic, Lynn could not be kept at home beyond the age of eleven. She'd become violent, threatening my mother. This was a heartbreaking interlude in my parents' lives, after I'd gone away to college... ¶ But Ray's sister wasn't autistic. ... had not been mentally defective, but shed been--"excitable"--"difficult"--"disobedient." ¶ Of the four children in Ray's family, Carol had been the rebellious one. ...resisted following orders from her parents ... "over-reacted" to the religious climate of the household. ¶ What did this mean? I asked. ¶ She hadn't been a good girl--a good little Catholic girl. She hadn't been devout. She'd been loud, argumentative. ¶ And what happened to her? I asked. ¶ She was institutionalized. When she was about eleven. Like your sister. But for different reasons.

page 379: It's a fact, a man will love his father--in some way. ¶ Snarled and twisted like the roots of a gigantic tree--these are the contortions of familial love. ¶ Yet even now, if Ray were to return--could I ask him about his father? His family? Would I dare? Or would the slightest frown on Ray's part discourage me, and deflect the conversation onto another subject, as it always did? ¶ As a wife, I had never wanted to upset my husband. I had never wanted to quarrel, to disagree or to be disagreeable. To be not loved seemed to me the risk, if a wife confronted her husband against his wishes. ¶ And now, I am not loved. And what a strange lucidity this seems to bring, like disinfectant slapped on an open wound.

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you are a widow or someone else who has suffered a loss and are seeking comfort, run, run as fast as you can, away from this book. There is little, if any, comfort to be found here.

Joyce Smith, known to most of us as Joyce Carol Oates, had been married to her husband for 47 years when he died after a short illness. She was, of course, devastated, and I truly am sorry for her sorrow. Still, I really didn't like this book.

Initially, I was annoyed by all the unnecessary exclamation points and italics, but those are minor annoyances, ones I can easily overlook. What bothered me more was the combination of extreme self-pity, condescension, and arrogance.

She includes italicized third-person guidelines as The Widow, almost a primer of widowhood. I think that her experiences are not every widow's experiences, and it is presumptuous to write as if they are; it is disconcerting to read.

There is much too much detail. I really am not interested in every sleeping pill she took, every email she sent or received, every thought of suicide, the extreme minutiae of her life. She was battling depression, certainly understandable, but did she have to work so hard at dragging me into her depression?

Concerned friends gave her endless support, but others sent her baskets of fruit, flowers and plants, things to express their sympathy, and she resented these as she dragged them to the garbage unopened. She resented well-meaning acquaintances who tried to express condolences when she didn't want to hear them. She resented people who didn't know the right thing to say so said the wrong thing, even though it seems very likely that she did the same thing before she became a widow.

When meeting with friends who were divorced, who had been betrayed by their husbands, she writes:

Where there is betrayal, there can be anger, rage. I am thinking with envy how much healthier, how much more exhilarating, such emotions would be, than the heavyheartedness of grief like a sodden overcoat the widow must wear.

Excuse me? She presumes to feel that her pain is greater, and that there would be exhilaration if she had been betrayed rather than widowed?

Not one person in this room would want to trade places with you: widow.

And...

Trying to cheer yourself up when the only significant fact of your life is, you are alone. You are a widow and you are alone....You are a failure, you are an unloved woman no longer young, you are worthless, you are trash. And you are ridiculous....

At one point, JCO is thinking of having a T-shirt imprinted with:

YES MY HUSBAND DIED,
YES I AM VERY SAD,
YES YOU ARE KIND TO OFFER CONDOLENCES,
NOW CAN WE CHANGE THE SUBJECT?

I wanted the subject changed long before the book ended. The book was not badly written but did not appeal to me; perhaps it will to other readers. Because of that and because I admire some of JCO's writing, I am giving it one star more than I would have otherwise.

I was given an advance copy of this book by the publisher, and the quotes may have changed in the published edition.

[Jenny Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not finish this book. It's another of those books written by someone anointed by the literary establishment who appears to have no sense of humor, no empathy, and no sense of how spoiled and conceited they sound. Oates recounts her husband's unexpected death in a tone that pushes the reader away when they would most like to connect.

One of the perils of being a darling of the literary establishment appears to be that there are vultures there eager to profit from every word that drips off one's pen, including those, like this one, that should have stayed in a box under the bed or been saved for the perusal of a sympathetic biographer.

[Rachel Aranda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is quite a complicated book to review as it deals with one woman's emotional journey from when she first thinks about how she and her husband could have died until the point when her husband does die and her fear becomes a reality.

The strongest part of "A Widow's Story" are the emotional connections that we all have when we lose someone we love. While I haven't lost my romantic partner to death (knock on wood and thank goodness) I have lost quite a few people who have helped shape me into the person I am currently. A lot of what Mrs. Oates-Smith writes about I understood. Noticing how we could have skipped "minor things" (like eating and sleeping) in order to spend time with our loved one. Leaving and entering areas that they used to be in and how it rips a part of your heart and soul with how unnatural it feels doing this. There are other moments throughout this book had me shaking my head up and down at how I've done the exact same thing. I understand that there are moments that a person doesn't want to share but I feel like there were emotional parts missing at this book. It would have been nice to have had Mrs. Oates-Smith share just a little bit more of her emotions instead of giving us a play-by-play of her thought process. In my opinion, you need to mix your thoughts and emotions together in order to fully share in your writings when writing a memoir, and this book just didn't do that well sometimes.

Even though the emotional side is taken care of I felt that the writing wasn't the best that I've read. It's a memoir about one of the most difficult thing to ever go through so I feel like I can give a small break about the writing. Still this is an established author so I feel like the writing shouldn't have been as blunt and sometimes harsh as it should have been. Again this might have been due to what I wrote about how Mrs. Oates-Smith tended to write her thoughts more than emotions.

[Joan · Rating 1 out of 5]

First, I must say that I find JCO's fiction to be too disturbing to read. After reading one of her novels in which a group of teenagers kidnap a random person off the street and proceed to torture him, I figured that there are better ways to spend my time.

However, "A Widow's Story" is the kind of book, a memoir about grief, that I usually devour. My 9 year old daughter died suddenly in 2006, so I usually like to learn from ways that others have dealt with life's big losses.

In this case, I mostly came away thinking that she may be as disturbed as her fictional characters. First, it seems pretty obvious that she is anorexic. Second, her marriage seems to have been quite shallow. How do you avoid talking about anything of substance for 47 years? Third, the book made me wonder if she had a real problem with prescription drugs.

Finally, she seems to never have faced many of life's realities. For example, how in the world could she NEVER have contemplated the mortality of her husband? He was 77.... Of course, she should be devastated by his death. However, there seems to be no underlying rational thoughts that could have helped her through. Like - "I know it feels hopeless now, but time will pass. I will be able to function more normally at some point in the future."

Overall, she seems like she may have been a "hot mess" all along, and this disruption pushed her into the abyss.

I found the book to be too long and too histrionic. I found her to be unappealing and impossible to relate to. Instead of this book, I recommend "A Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. Even though Didion is also a famous, wealthy person, I still felt that I could relate to and learn from her experiences.

[فریبا ارجمند]

شروع خوبی داشت، اما خیلی سریع تبدیل به آه و ناله الکی شد. حتما تربیت شرقی من در نگاهم به کتاب و احساسم به آن تاثیر داشته. تقریبا صد صفحه‌اش را گوش دادم و تصمیم گرفتم رهایش کنم‌. اولین تجربه‌ام با این نویسنده موفق نبود.
هیچوقت شرح حال دوست نداشتم. در این مورد خاص، دانستن این که نویسنده شش ماه پس از مرگ همسرش با یک نفر آشنا میشه و در ۷۱ سالگی دوباره ازدواج می‌کنه، به حس منفی‌ام دامن زد.
نکته منفی دیگر کتاب برای من پرداختن بیش از حد و گاهی تکراری به جزییات کم اهمیت بود.
دلم می‌خواست زنی از جهان سوم درباره تجربه بیوه شدن می‌نوشت. خانم اوتس در دنیایی زندگی می‌کنه که به اندازه زمین تا مریخ با دنیای ما جهان سومی‌ها فاصله داره

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates has written a deeply felt memoir, `A Widow's Story', following the sudden death of Raymond Smith, her husband of 48 years. He enters the hospital for pneumonia and "A secondary infection had caused cardiopulmonary arrest, and he was gone. It was just utterly unbelievable. I feel so completely alone. Though surrounded by the most wonderful friends". Because the prognosis for Ray was good when Joyce left the hospital, she went home to sleep and was not there when he died. She gets a phone call after midnight telling her that her husband is still alive but by the time she gets to the hospital he is dead.

Joyce questions her judgment. Should she have brought him to the emergency room sooner? "Always I will think; as I exercised poor judgment, bringing Ray to the regional Princeton hospital, and keeping him there when he would surely have received superior care elsewhere, so my judgment is faulty now, inexplicable." Joyce is in a haze. She second guesses herself repeatedly and wonders if she had taken different action would Ray still be alive.

Following Ray's death, Joyce is bombarded by what she terms "death duties". Her life is fraught with paperwork: death certificates, executor duties, attorneys, condolence cards, and even the DMV. She is in a haze, feeling all alone and frequently considering suicide. She keeps a cache of pills that she's accumulated from the past and pills she gets now - codeine, sleeping pills, lorazepam, etc. She can't sleep. Every night she faces insomnia. "Where some may be frightened by the thought, the temptation, of suicide, the widow is consoled by the temptation of suicide. For suicide promises A good night's sleep - with no interruptions! And no next-day."

The book is steeped in grief and the ever-present identity of herself as "the widow". "For it is clear - widow trumps all other identities, including rational individual." She speaks of the epiphanies that come with grief. "But grief will not bring us much else." "For a widow has learned that the ordinary can so quickly turn extraordinary, and the extraordinary ordinary."

Joyce is so broken that she can rarely speak on the telephone. She finds it impossible to answer letters of condolences. She does not know what to do with all the flowers, presents from `Harry and David's', and when the doorbell rings she runs to the back of her house to avoid answering it. She feels like the prisoner of the basilisk, a monster ever-present in her being.

"My discovery is: each day is livable if divided into segments. More accurately each day is livable only if divided into segments." There is the morning, early afternoon, late afternoon, and the evening. She has a `nest' in her bed which is the safest part of her life, a place she retreats to and never wants to leave. When she does manage to sleep for a while, it is almost impossible to awaken.

She finds that she can work and that speaking engagements keep her going. She also enjoys dinner engagements with very close friends, along with e-mailing them. She realizes that if she started cancelling engagements, "I might have canceled the next engagement. And the next. And one morning, I wouldn't get out of bed at all.

This is a raw book, a scab repeatedly picked at over and over till it bleeds. It is painful and immediate. Ms. Oates' grief is ever-present and without abate. It is an ode to her husband Ray and the story of her loss and attempts to go on without him. It is a book of magical thinking - for what if Ray is really alive? What if I looked around the bend and saw him? The book is personal and rings with truth. It is phenomenally sad and difficult to read but I found it to be immensely important. Any of us might be widows one day and this book let me into the shadow of that dark and terrible place.

[Tessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of this book describes exactly what it is. Joyce Carol Oates takes the reader on a journey through the intimate pain of losing her husband after decades of marriage. Unafraid as a writer, Oates allows us genuine glimpses into her struggle to live through the days of her husband's illness, death, and the following year of her life. I feel like this was a "right place, right time" book for me. I was genuinely surprised by how completely it captured my attention and inhabited my heart. I read the book after reading an excerpt of it in The New Yorker. An excerpt that I read no less than 6 times and which brought me to tears each time. Tenderness leaps off the pages. Through its descriptions of the heights of love, it shows that two people can love each other sweetly and loyally through a lifetime together. It also beautifully describes the extreme pain of losing that which you love most and gracefully allows a small look into a grand journey of grief.

Spoiler Alert! Two excerpts:

"As he was revealed to be a born gardener with a gardener's zest for working in the soil with his hands, so he was revealed to be a born editor with a zest for working with writers, nurturing their work and publishing it. Many of his closest friendships were editor/writer relationships forged in the intimacy of letters, phone calls, faxes. ... Editors and gardeners are perennial optimists. No one steeped in a tragic sense of life can be either."

"Essential as it is to be immersed in one's work it is equally essential to move through it, and past it. It's a terrible thing to be devoured by one's work--you must learn to leap free of it as one might leap free of a raging fire."

[Laura T · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read glowing literary reviews of this book, so when I finally got around to reading it, I expected to enjoy it, as much as one can enjoy a book about such a sad subject. I was disappointed. Listen, JCO has my utmost sympathy for her terrible loss. One of my worst nightmares is losing my husband. My annoyance with the book is not with her grief, because of course, anyone would be terribly grieved in their heart after such a loss. My annoyance is with her belly-button gazing, her sympathy rejecting (she received an outpouring of amazing gift baskets after the death of her husband, which she threw directly into the trash, not even bothering to donate to a homeless shelter or women's shelter, or someplace that might have benefitted from the extra food), her unwillingness to have any hope. The thing that struck me was that she simply refused to do any of the things that help any person when coping with terrible tragedy. It was just 300 pages or so of "me, mine, I, my". You do that much introspection, and you're bound to have a hard time.

After I finished this book, I attempted to read my first JCO fiction, "The Gravedigger's Daughter". I had to finally quit and walk away instead of continuing to waste my time on it. She used phrases so repeatedly, I wondered if her editor was drunk or just indifferent when reading the book and sending it to print. The book was draggy, and I was already annoyed with the narrator/main character. I guess it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy the writings of JCO, and I guess I'm just not that person.

[Caterina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kadıköy Kitap Günleri'nde aldığım, bir süredir okunacaklar rafında bekleyen kitaptı Dul Kadının Öyküsü.

ilk birkaç sayfayı okuduğumda, "acaba yazarın gerçek yaşamında başından geçenleri mi bu yazdıkları?" diye düşünüp biraz araştırma yaptım. Okuduklarım düşüncemi doğruladı.

2008 yılında zatürreye bağlı komplekslerden yitirdiği eşinin ardından iç dünyasını tüm çıplaklığıyla kaleme almış JCO.

Diğer anı romanlardan farkı, yazı sanatı ve edebiyat üzerine bir yazarın düşünce gelişimi ve hayatta karşılaştıkları üzerine ışık tutması. Zira JCO bazı bölümlerde geçmişe giderek yaşamının ücra köşelerini göz önüne sermiş.

İcerikte okumak isteyebileceğiniz çok sayıda kitap önerisi de var. Diger yazarların sanatsal duruşlarından bir şeyler de yakalayabiliyorsunuz. Bu bağlamda da çok keyifliydi.

26 sayfaya yer imi koymuşum. Bunlardan bir kaçı şöyle:

Syf 105: "Belkide onu hiç tanıyamadım. Belki gerçek anlamda hiç tanımıyorum kocamı. Çünkü kocamı -onun bilmeme izin verdiği kadar- tanıyorum."

Syf 118: "Tek başınalıkta bir korku var, yalnızlığın kendisini de aşan bir korku."


Syf 123: "Bizler dil kullanmaya bağımlıyız, akıl sağlığımız için."

Syf292: "Acıyı bir hastalık gibi düşünmeliyim, Atlatılacak bir hastalık..."

Sevdiği birini yitirmiş bir insanin hayatı nasıl etkilenir, neler düşünür anlamak bağlamında çok keyifliydi.

Hayatımızda önemi olan birilerini yitirmeden okuyabildiğim için mutluyum.

[Joan Colby · Rating 4 out of 5]

The somewhat jumbled structure of this book accurately depicts the conflicting emotions one feels after a loss, such as Oates experienced when her husband Ray unexpectedly died after a siege of pneumonia. There is a great deal of repetition, but that’s how grief is, unrelenting. At times, A Widow’s Story seems like a prolonged howl—Oates opens herself to the reader, but the experience is almost painful. It is surprising to learn that Oates was a girl who went from her father’s house to her husband’s –one wouldn’t guess this from her fiction which is unique and forceful. She paints herself as almost entirely dependent on her husband; a wife who never argued or broached unpleasant subjects, wanting always to please. Their extreme closeness as a couple also has some odd turns: that Ray never read Oates novels or stories, that Oates never read Ray’s abandoned novel, though they discussed the press they ran and their teaching experiences. In the aftermath of Ray’s death, Oates considers suicide, hoards pills, fears addiction to the tranquilizers she takes in order to sleep, relies on many faithful friends for support and forces herself to maintain the public “Joyce Carol Oates” in continuing to teach and give readings. All in all, this is an extraordinary portrayal of an enormous grief that embodies anger, confusion and despair.

[Hoosier · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading the 400+ pages of "A Widow's Story" written by Joyce Smith, aka Joyce Carol Oats (JCO), I have no idea whether JCO intended to write a book to honor the memory of her husband, Ray; to talk about her life as a widow; or to recount her various successes. While JCO does a beautiful job, at times, discussing the aftermath of her life after Ray's death, the unclear focus of the book detracts from the story. I have difficulty recommending this book unless one wants to learn more about JCO's life.

The book begins with JCO's recount of a trip she took to the hospital to visit Ray. At the end of the brief hospital trip, JCO finds an extemely rude letter that had been left on her windshield that serves to shed light on the insensibility of some people to the hardships of others. She describes her thoughts on this note in a short paragraph at the end of the chapter. I found that these personal stories inserted by JCO in italics at the end of many chapters were the most enjoyable part of the book. For example, JCO showed insight when she described that many widows may call their home voicemail after their husband's death only to hear their husband's voice on the voicemail recording.

JCO describes herself as an independant women who lived a life apart, both mentally and physically, from her husband. JCO visited Ray in the hospital everyday for only short periods of time and she and Ray worked on their own projects during most of those visits. JCO took many business trips away from Ray during their marriage and they only ever shared good news with each other for fear of hurting the other person with bad news. After Ray's death, however, JCO contemplates suicide and devotes over half of the book to her suicidal ideation. I therefore found it difficult to reconcile the post-Ray JCO with the pre-Ray JCO.

Furthermore, I cannot determine if JCO comprises her morals only due to the devastation she suffers from Ray's death or she truly is a callous person. For example, JCO throws away most of the sympathy gift baskets that she receives, even before opening them, and does not read many of the condolence notes sent to her. She describes people that send her books to review or comment on as "predator sharks" and cannot believe that "their naivete in imagining that any publication of theirs, any achievement, will make the slightest difference in their lives, or in the lives of others." JCO also forgets to let one of her elderly cats in on a cold night and the cat dies from frostbite.

[Fred Moramarco · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I can wade Grief/Whole pools of it" wrote Emily Dickinson, and Joyce Carol Oates does a considerable amount of wading in her deeply felt memoir, "A Widow's Story," written in the three years following her husband, Raymond Smith's, death in February, 2008. Although her remarriage just a bit over a year later certainly brings a happy ending to this grief chronicle, it is nowhere mentioned in the book. The Times reviewer Janet Maslin made this notion a central focus of her review, and though it is a legitimate issue, Maslin treats it with an unpalatable meanness. Perhaps she was influenced by these sentences cruelly juxtaposed in Oates' Wikipedia entry: "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy[...]My marriage--my love for my husband--seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment." In early 2009 Oates married Professor Charles Gross of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton.

Surely one is glad to learn that the pain and anguish obviously experienced and so fully described in "A Widow's Story," subsided relatively quickly and that she was able to "move on" and find a new chapter in her life. But her memoir deals primarily with the several months after the shock of Smith's "unexpected" death. Oates repeats the word "unexpected" many times in the book, and it made me aware of how deeply our American denial of aging and death is. When a man is age 79, as Smith was when he died, he has already lived a year or two beyond the average life expectancy for American men, yet his death is still regarded as unexpected, as though we have somehow triumphed over mortality.

Because women outlive men by nearly a decade or more, the widow's grief memoir has become something of a genre of its own. I've been writing a series of essays on aging, and I've read a half-dozen or more of them in the last few years, starting with Joan Didion's stunning "The Year of Magical Thinking," about the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through Anne Roiphe's "Epilogue," Eleanor Clift's "Two Weeks of Life," Sandra Gilbert's "Wrongful Death," and Antonia Fraser's "Must You Go?" the latter about her life with Harold Pinter. In fact, Oates' memoir makes me think of the phenomenon as not only a genre but an industry. On the back cover of my advance edition of the book the publisher touts a huge marketing campaign including print, radio, online media, a 13-city author tour and even an "Outreach to Grief Awareness Groups." Death not only thrives in America; it sells.

Despite that, this book appears a searingly honest account of a major life trauma, although several aspects of it kept nagging at me as I read it. Nearly all of these grief memoirs give me a sense of how proprietary people are about their own grief. "A Widow's Story" is certainly no exception. Although death and loss are as common as beach sand, I came away from the book admiring the first few sections of it (that I read serialized The New Yorker) more than I did the remaining more than three-hundred pages which are characterized by a good deal of repetition, a lot of "widow" definition, and a prevailing sense that nothing like this wonderfully devoted couple ever existed before. There is also a great deal about how separated the writer of this book feels from her own persona, the highly productive "Joyce Carol Oates," but very little about how Raymond Smith might have felt being "Mr. Joyce Carol Oates."
There are, however, beneath the surface, several clear indications that things might not have been quite so bucolic as they seem. First of all, this couple, who spent hardly any time apart from one another since their meeting in 1960, avoided many important issues that cropped up between them. Oates said that Smith never liked to discuss his relationship with his father, he never liked to talk about anything negative, he never discussed his strict religious upbringing and the influence of religion on his life, and most significantly, he never read any of her fiction. This struck me as especially unusual, since he was himself a literary critic and editor, and certainly must have had some curiosity about his wife's work. But the reasons for the avoidance become clearer as we learn about an unfinished novel that Smith worked on and off on throughout his life. So here is a man unable to complete a single work of fiction in his 79 years of life married to the most prolific fiction writer in America. Hmmm. We get very little inkling of how he felt about this. Oates avoids (or withholds) reading the manuscript of this novel until the very last chapters of her book, and when she does she discovers things about her husband and their relationship of which she was never before aware.

But all this is carping, because this may be Joyce Carol Oates' best book (I can't really say because I have only read about a half dozen of them). In any case, it's the first book she has written where we get inside her own nerve endings rather than her vivid imagination, and we experience with her the disorientation that the end of a major life chapter can bring. Although she ultimately realizes, as many do when they learn something startling about someone they thought they knew well, that between even the most intimate among us there is "something unknowable, inaccessible. A stubborn intractable intransigent otherness." I'm very glad to have read it because it bridges a bit of that intransigent otherness at least between her readers and herself.

[Lynne Perednia · Rating 4 out of 5]

For 48 years and 25 days, Joyce Carol Oates thought of herself not as the author Joyce Carol Oates, but as Joyce Smith, wife of Raymond Smith, professor and editor of The Ontario Review. That thinking, that life, is abruptly shattered in the middle of a February night in 2008 when she receives a call from the hospital where she had taken her pneumonia-stricken husband a few days earlier, summoning her to get there quicky because her husband was still alive.

When she got there, he wasn't.

The guilt, the grief, the bewilderment, the anger and the depression of those first few hours, days and weeks are chronicled in A Widow's Story. The anguish is unrelenting and the chronicling deal with both the minutiae and large-scale ramifications to daily living and to one's sense of self and value of living.

Reaction to the memoir has centered on comparing this work to Joan Didion's brilliant memoir when she lost both her husband and daughter, and to Oates's remarrying soon after her first husband's death. It's been uniformly negative, with a level of disdain puzzling to someone who has only read a few short stories and one novel of the author's. They had macabre elements but also poignant moments. It's possible to see the curiosity of the author behind the stories, wondering how people would feel if placed in such a situation or how different characteristics would produce different reactions. Those explorations are legitimate reasons to write fiction and should certainly be welcome within the scope of a major reason for fiction to exist: To explore the human condition in its myriad complicated, glorious forms. Oates displays the same kind of intellectual curiosity to her own reactions when her husband dies.

Oates may well be bringing up Didion when she writes late in her book about another well-known writer, a friend, whose husband died and who wrote a best-selling memoir about the experience. The friend writes a letter to Oates about being stunned and how getting over that was a huge obstacle. Oates uses that as a springboard to wonder how much of grief is vanity. She returns to a trope she uses time and again throughout the book: That the widow should be punished, should be ridiculed, should be made miserable by the judgment of others.

While many other writers would stick with the original idea about being stunned, and a few others might take that as the foundation for a treatise on guilt, Oates instead goes into the territory of her insomnia, the medication she is fitfully taking for it and how taking it takes away discernment. Perhaps this is the basis for much criticism of Oates's writing. She certainly piles it on in this book, one idea going to another to another to another in non-linear fashion. Some readers may want to let each idea have its own space and time.

But just as Oates's story is not Didion's, neither are they going to view their experiences in the same way or write about them in the same way. So to criticize Oates for not writing like Didion is to criticize her for not being another person.

Even more major has been the criticism that Oates does not reveal in her memoir that she remarried 11 months after her husband's death. In the final pages, this man is mentioned obliquely as an unexpected guest to a dinner party in her home, that her life will be altered after that evening and that anything which is a gift is given not because it is deserved but because it is a gift.

Oates gives the reason why she would remarry earlier on, though, quoting a letter she wrote to a friend two months after her husband's death. She writes about how hard it is to live alone, that she cannot concentrate and that she worries about being able to keep on living this way. She also writes that she would likely still not be alive if not for her friends. So it's no wonder she sought solace by marrying again. Some people thrive on solitude, some do not. Some honor their late spouses by craving the continuance of the kind of life they led with their spouse.

For other people to condemn Oates because she didn't react the same way that Didion did, or that they think she should react, is a petty reaction. To be condemned for not being someone else or for not seeing things with the same perspective as the person doing the judging is to deny the humanity of the person condemned. Oates, with her insistence on the widow being punished, appears to know in advance she would be judged harshly. And she includes events that do not put her in a good light, such as one concerning one of their cats who preferred Ray over her, but which a good novelist would include in a book about a flawed character.

Yes, Oates's memoir is bloated and repetitive. But it also is a chronicle of a very low point in someone's life and how she has chosen to recount it. She does honor her late husband by conveying what a kind and gentle man he was, by writing about his garden, his work and his unfinished, unpublished novel that she reads after his death. In writing about that novel, Oates also shows how she begins to come to terms with her husband's death by answering for herself questions she has about him after he dies. Writers interested in the process of creating fiction should be drawn to the story of Raymond Smith's lifelong work in progress and how a prolific novelist looks at that work.

A Widow's Story may be far from a "perfect" representation, no matter how a reader defines perfection, but it is a worthwhile testament to what the experience of sudden widowhood meant in the early going to one woman.

[Polly · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a disappointment. I feel like a jerk, criticizing anyone's personal voyage through grief and pain, but this memoir is not a voyage because it doesn't go anywhere. It never leaves the dock -- no growth, no redemption or healing, no story arc of any kind.

If my narrator is to be believed -- and that's a big "if," for reasons I'll explain -- she spent the better part of a year in a dual state of personal shock, pain, weakness, medicated fog, and suicidal ideation after the death of her husband; along with a frenetic pace of professional readings and appearances, and social outings with a wide circle of friends.

Add to this, the weird (to me) dichotomy of the 41-year marriage: clearly loving, touchingly intimate and affectionate; yet, he didn't read her fiction, and they didn't discuss "upsetting things." Wha?!

Then, there's the child-like respect, the near-formality with which she portrays her late husband through 90% of the book... right up until the point where she trots out his deeply personal, roughly unfinished novel manuscript that was so private to him, he had not even shared it with her! She spends two chapters laying it bare, sharing his personal notes and her own intrusive musings for all the world to see. I mean, WOW.

All of this, taken into context with the elephant in the room -- she was broken... suicidal... so sad, that she couldn't reply to the voluminous condolence gifts and notes sent by friends and acquaintances who spent their time, money, and care to reach out to her in her time of grief. She couldn't bear to enjoy the beautiful flowers coming back to her husband's garden until 3/4 of the way through the book. But hey, one learns (from GOOGLE, not our grieving narrator) that she was dating again within six months and married in just outside of a year. However, she fails to mention this rather glaring part of the story at all.

Others may find this grief memoir meaningful, particularly those who have lost loved ones themselves. For me, there was very little redeeming value here.

[Meg Ulmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I first saw the advertisement for this memoir in the New York Times Book Review, I knew that I had to read it. Several weeks later when I found it on the new book shelf in my local library, I knew that it would be a challenge for me to read because I am still going through the grieving process. When I scanned the first few pages of the memoir and discovered that Ms. Oates' husband had died within 11 days of my own in 2008, I knew the book would speak to me.

And it has. I have been challenged in reading this memoir as it hits so close to home. In doing so, the book has validated many of my feelings and experiences as a widow. I would recommend this book without reservation for anyone who has experienced the loss of my partner and best friend as I have. If you have not yet experienced this incredible loss, I will paraphrase something that Ms. Oates says early on in her memoir: Anyone who is married or in a long-term relationship is only a widow or widower-to-be.

Regardless of your situation, this memoir is a challenging, meaty, painful, and inspiring read.

[Jacqueline Masumian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book devastates. Not only because of the subject matter, widowhood, but because Joyce Carol Oates' exquisite writing digs deep into the horrors of unexpected loss, a tangle of painful feelings and severe aloneness. When her husband dies unexpectedly, Oates is plagued by an otherworldly sense of grief. She alternately struggles and flirts with thoughts of suicide. Insomnia nearly destroys her, and she wrestles with fear of addiction to sleeping pills and antidepressants.

Not recommended for women who have recently lost their loved ones, it is a very powerful book, and for me a grim reminder that I may someday be a widow; how will I deal with it? Also a clue as to how widows need solid, sincere support from their friends rather than a barrage of cards and gift baskets.

[Shannon Hovey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joyce Carol Oates has become one of my favorite authors. Her memoir is honest and brave, describing not only the loneliness and sadness of losing a spouse, but the clinical depression and suicidal ideations, the feeling of not knowing what to do, of having lost her purpose in life, lost without the man she'd been with for over 40 years. I see some reviewers saying it was repetitive and boring - I think the repetition is intentional; it mimics the repetitive nature of her life during those first six months of widowhood. I would recommend this to anyone who has lost someone they'd built their life around, and to anyone who is already a fan of this prolific author.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tend to not enjoy reading memoirs, which Joyce Carol Oates describes in this poignant book as at once the most seductive and dangerous of genres. At their worst, they come across as whiny (look at poor me and the vicissitudes I've overcome...) and at best, self-congratulatory. But then every so often one comes along, like Ann Patchett's memoir of a friendship in "Truth and Beauty", and this book by Oates about surviving the death of her husband.

At some point, most of us will survive the loss of a loved one -- a parent, a child, a spouse. It's almost banal. And yet out of this experience, Oates has crafted a book that is unsparing of herself and yet a tribute to the value of loving and being loved. The death of her husband, Ray Smith, literally unmoors her, and she drifts far away from her former life, uncertain of whether she wants to return to it or if she ever can. Thoughts of suicide tempt her -- a basilisk figure lurking in the edge of her vision eggs her on, repeatedly, reminding her that she is a valueless person on her own -- even as she battles through the practicalities (disposing of the endless Harry & David "sympathy baskets", coping with distraught cats, reading a stream of sympathy letters.

What struck me as most authentic and valid in this memoir is something that we should all try to remember (including the reviewer who described the author as arrogant and self-pitying): we cannot ever see inside of another's soul to fully understand the torment they are going through. If we are honest, we don't want to. What Oates has done in this memoir is to force us to confront the magnitude of the pain that the death of a spouse of 47 years brings in its wake; a pain that can be amplified rather than muted by the well-meaning gestures and platitudes of others. For whom do we exist? That's a question that Oates tackles indirectly and her verdict is mixed. Despite pondering suicide (periodically, throughout this memoir, she pauses to contemplate just how many pills she has available, and rejoices when she can obtain more) Oates opts for survival, of some kind. But it's as much despite the care and attention of her friends (appreciated, yet never a panacea as no panacea exists) as because of it.

This book is more an act of catharsis than it is one that is intended to be helpful to others in similar situations. But it's also the most honest I've ever read about the way death of a loved one pushes one into oneself, into a state of mind and being that others too often dismiss as "selfish" or self-absorbed.

I didn't find this book depressing, for it is as at least as much about the tremendous power and endurance of love as it as about the sorrows and traumas associated with its loss. As we age, we realize how inextricably the two are linked, and Oates is to be praised for not letting us get away with thinking that we will find the process inspirational or ultimately of value. It's not an easy book to read, but it's powerful, and it goes on to my list of the best books of the year that I've read so far. I wouldn't recommend that anyone who has recently lost a loved one read it -- it may rub salt in the wound, may irritate or anger someone who feels and reacts to that loss in a different manner -- but anyone over the age of 40 should read it, as well as anyone who wants to be reassured that a memoir isn't just a "look how great I am" book in disguise. I've rated it 5 stars.

Full disclosure: I obtained a copy of the book from the publishers via NetGalley.com

[Rachel Aranda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is quite a complicated book to review as it deals with one woman's emotional journey from when she first thinks about how she and her husband could have died until the point when her husband does die and her fear becomes a reality.

The strongest part of "A Widow's Story" are the emotional connections that we all have when we lose someone we love. While I haven't lost my romantic partner to death (knock on wood and thank goodness) I have lost quite a few people who have helped shape me into the person I am currently. A lot of what Mrs. Oates-Smith writes about I understood. Noticing how we could have skipped "minor things" (like eating and sleeping) in order to spend time with our loved one. Leaving and entering areas that they used to be in and how it rips a part of your heart and soul with how unnatural it feels doing this. There are other moments throughout this book had me shaking my head up and down at how I've done the exact same thing. I understand that there are moments that a person doesn't want to share but I feel like there were emotional parts missing at this book. It would have been nice to have had Mrs. Oates-Smith share just a little bit more of her emotions instead of giving us a play-by-play of her thought process. In my opinion, you need to mix your thoughts and emotions together in order to fully share in your writings when writing a memoir, and this book just didn't do that well sometimes.

Even though the emotional side is taken care of I felt that the writing wasn't the best that I've read. It's a memoir about one of the most difficult thing to ever go through so I feel like I can give a small break about the writing. Still this is an established author so I feel like the writing shouldn't have been as blunt and sometimes harsh as it should have been. Again this might have been due to what I wrote about how Mrs. Oates-Smith tended to write her thoughts more than emotions.

The narrator, Ellen Parker, does a good job of capturing the hollow emotions that come from being exhausted of going through losing a partner and as email correspondents. I'm not sure I would ever seek an audiobook out that she's read though. Ms. Parker has a certain dull tone in her voice that while fitting for a book on death and mourning I can't see fitting for other audiobooks.

All in all this is a hard book to rate but I'd give the print version a 2 star rating as it was pretty difficult to continue reading. I put the book down many times to do other things. The audio version gets a 2.5 star rating was easier to follow but still easy to put down. I'd suggest people listen to the audio version over the printed version and that rarely happens.