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 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.