Synopsis
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.
About Joyce Carol Oates
See more books from this AuthorThe voice that echoes most hauntingly in this patchwork of vivid scenes, memories, reflections and hallucinatory visions, with some letters and e-mails thrown in, belongs to a sleepless widow in a tangle of bedclothes...
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from NY TimesBut it is less fair for “A Widow’s Story” to dissemble while masquerading as a work of raw courage and honesty. A book long and rambling enough to contemplate an answering-machine recording could have found time to mention a whole new spouse.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from NY TimesThis is a relentless and exhausting book, saturated by amorphous pain. In the 18th century women writers, then just entering literature, were mocked for trying to express extreme emotions through the typography of dashes, italics...
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from GuardianThis is one of the most compelling books I have read in a long time. One is with her, every inch of the way, as if her story were one's own.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from GuardianOne of the more remarkable aspects of A Widow's Story is her willingness to reveal the real Joyce Smith, as she calls herself, in all her fragile vulnerability, as distinct from "Joyce Carol Oates," the literary...
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from NPROates' raw emotion lifts the veil of the enormity of grief that most widows, and widowers, must feel at the loss of their partners in a way that will come as a shock to some and a relief to others.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from Star Tribune...that “next” book is Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, the spectacular memoir chronicling her husband’s abrupt passing and the loving life they shared.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from NY Journal of BooksOates's carnivorous prose style is well-suited to grief; her long sentences, slashed with em-dashes and bolted with exclamation points, her heavy sprinkling of italics, which sit on almost every page like tearstains - A widow must smile...
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from Globe and MailA Widow's Story is the painful, scorchingly angry journey of a woman struggling to live in a house "from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon."
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirFor Oates...the key to coping with tragedy is to engage with it, to seek in the logic of language some of the order that has been stripped from daily life.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A Memoir | See more reviews from LA Times...but this brave account of her recent grief seems composed with something close to abandon. It is as if Oates has decided, after the sudden death of her husband of 48 years, that her own inclination toward privacy is no longer important.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirThere are memorable sentences on every page, little crystalline moments that leap out and stay imprinted in your mind for days afterwards. It’s an extraordinary piece of work – naked, unflinching and unforgettable.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirOates’s tender account of her long marriage and her brief widowhood is raw, and doesn’t shrink from exposing the weakness, ugliness and selfishness of extreme grief, as well as its bitter comedy.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirThis "handbook" on widowhood, as Oates calls it, is essential for anyone who has experienced loss. Whether detailing...Oates proves an utterly compelling protagonist. Her prose is gorgeous and precise.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirIn a lesser writer's hands, the 88 short, disjointed chapters that form "A Widow's Story" might congeal into a confused mess. Oates, however, is fully in control — as a writer, heightened emotion is the essential ingredient in her work.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirOates, though, goes inward to the core of her grief, and it turns out to be quite an opportunity for her tool kit and palate for weirdness.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirOates has parsed the explosive, psychological lives of her fictional characters with laserlike precision in countless novels and short stories. In her astonishingly candid A Widow's Story: A Memoir, she turns inward with equally brutal intensity.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirThe overall emotion of this memoir is of poignancy, not of sorrow. We come away feeling that real life is worthwhile, after all. This is a book that many people will turn to in times of despair to find language for their deepest emotions.
Read Full Review of A Widow's Story: A MemoirAn aggregated and normalized score based on 442 user ratings from iDreamBooks & iTunes