A Widow's Story

I was kicking myself for choosing this book to read over spring break. What was I thinking? Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award-winning author, suddenly and unexpectedly loses her husband of more than forty years and she falls apart. This book is a memoir of the months she spent after his death trying to use words, the one thing she has always been able to count on, to find a way to live again.




As a person who has studied happiness for many years, Oates did everything wrong. She secluded herself. She obsessed over her loss. She had thoughts of suicide.




Stop here if you don't want spoilers, but read on if you, like me, are always secretly in search of the happy ending. Oates does come out of her depression. It seems to have happened because of some mysterious combination of her reading of her husband's single, never-completed, never-published novel and Oates' decision to begin to work in her husband's garden. Perhaps the writing of this book helped as well. In any case, I read that Oates has married again. Good for her.




*Thank you to Suzanne at Chick With Books for awarding me this book in her Memoir Monday Giveaway.