A Widow's Story

Oates's memoir is a brave, unvarnished story about the death of her husband and the life she tries to resume in the aftermath. As the author recounts her story, her magnificent literary talents shine. Narrator Ellen Parker captures the mood of the book without making it morose. Her voice is clear and gentle, and she reads with the near-perfect diction we would expect of Oates. Surprisingly, though, Parker's delivery is not emotionally expressive. She keeps her voice in a tight range that suggests a monotone, but her pauses, intonation, and pacing make the story compelling and fresh. We know what will happen, but we want to let Parker guide us through to the end. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

December 20, 2010
Early one morning in February 2008, Oates drove her husband, Raymond Smith, to the Princeton Medical Center where he was admitted with pneumonia. There, he developed a virulent opportunistic infection and died just one week later. Suddenly and unexpectedly alone, Oates staggered through her days and nights trying desperately just to survive Smith's death and the terrifying loneliness that his death brought. In her typically probing fashion, Oates navigates her way through the choppy waters of widowhood, at first refusing to accept her new identity as a widow. She wonders if there is a perspective from which the widow's grief is sheer vanity, this pretense that one's loss is so very special that there has never been a loss quite like it. In the end, Oates finds meaning, much like many of Tolstoy's characters, in the small acts that make up and sustain ordinary life. When she finds an earring she thought she'd lost in a garbage can that raccoons have overturned, she reflects, "If I have lost the meaning of my life, and the love of my life, I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash." At times overly self-conscious, Oates nevertheless shines a bright light in every corner in her soul-searing memoir of widowhood.

October 15, 2010

Like Joan Didion, another well-known author who wrote about her husband's death (The Year of Magical Thinking), Oates, referring to herself here as Joyce Smith, shares with us the sudden and unexpected demise of her husband, Raymond Smith, editor of the Ontario Review, which he founded with Oates in 1974. The two were married for 48 years. Oates recounts her husband's fatal bout of pneumonia and the arduous aftermath: dealing with death duties, the terror of aloneness, the sleeplessness, the thoughts of suicide. She gets help from friends and from medication, but it takes her months before she can face and accept being on her own. VERDICT This book is beautifully written and very affecting. Oates is honest and forthcoming about her fears, dazed state, and outer mien vs. inner terror. Readers will become emotionally involved then feel relief when Oates is finally able to move on. A worthy purchase that will be appreciated by readers of memoir generally and older readers especially.--Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2010

A wildly unhinged, deeply intimate look at the eminent author's "derangement of Widowhood."

Oates's husband, Ontario Review co-founder Raymond J. Smith, a 78-year-old man in good health, was not supposed to die. In early 2008, he was admitted to the emergency room near their home in Princeton, N.J., and diagnosed with pneumonia. Then he developed complications from an bacterial infection and died of cardiac arrest on Feb. 18, 2008. The shock of losing her husband of 48 years nearly unraveled this author of countless novels, stories and essays, as well as a longtime professor of English at Princeton. In this surreal, nearly hallucinatory journey--she was referred to the Yellow Pages for a funeral home, soon became hooked on tranquilizers to overcome insomnia and often imagined a fiendish creature she calls a basilisk jeering at her--the author chronicles the painful first months of grief and emotional paralysis. Oates (Sourland, 2010, etc.) is a master at creating the interior-driven narrative, and fashions from her experience the character of the Widow--Mrs. Smith--distraught, vulnerable, helpless without the guidance of wise friends, susceptible to crippling regrets, prone to childish self-pity and even erupting in anger at a doctor who suggested that Ray just "gave up." She also invents the character of "JCO," the professor whom she had to "impersonate" at the university, the public self, the co-editor of the Ontario Review who had to inform their readers and writers that the literary review had to cease publication. Oates writes with gut-wrenching honesty and spares no one in ripping the illusions off the face of death--the relentless senders of "sympathy gift baskets" clotting her home like "party food," her husband who "threw away both our lives with [his] carelessness contracting a cold" and the friends and acquaintances who mouthed wooden responses.

Oates continues to keep her readers guessing at her next thrilling effort.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from October 1, 2010
Brutal violence and catastrophic loss are often the subjects of Oates powerful novels and stories. But as she reveals in this galvanizing memoir, her creative inferno was sequestered from her joyful life with her husband, Raymond Smith. A revered editor and publisher who did not read her fiction, Smith kept their household humming during their 48-year marriage. After his shocking death from a secondary infection while hospitalized with pneumonia, Oates found herself in the grip of a relentless waking nightmare. She recounts this horrific siege of grief with her signature perception, specificity, and intensity, from epic insomnia and terrifying hallucinations to the torment of death-duties, painful recognitions of confidences unshared and secrets harbored, and a chilling evaporation of meaning. But Oates also rallies to offer droll advice on how to be a good widow and describes her struggles with mountains of lavish sympathy gifts and the attendant trash with a widows slapstick-comedy. In a stunning extension of the compelling disclosures found in The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 19731982 (2007), protean and unflinching Oates has created an illuminating portrait of a marriage, a searing confrontation with death, an extraordinarily forthright chronicle of mourning, and a profound pilgrimage from chaos to coherence. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The incomparable, best-selling Oates fascinates readers, and her memoir of sudden widowhood will have an impact similar to Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)