Wife and War: The Memoir

by Amalie Flynn

WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR is Amalie Flynn’s story of 9/11, of being just blocks away and witnessing the terror attack, of running in the dust and debris as the Twin Towers collapsed behind her, and of how, in the years that followed 9/11, she became intertwined with the war on terror that began on that day. She became a military wife. She and her husband survived his 15 month deployment to Afghanistan. And then they endured the aftermath of war when war followed her husband home, occupied their house and their marriage, and created battlefields they did not expect. But WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR is more than just Flynn’s story. In a time when war spreads itself across the globe, WIFE AND WAR: THE MEMOIR is our story.

418 pages, Paperback

First published August 26, 2013

About the author

Amalie Flynn is a poet and author of Watermelon (Alien Buddha 2024), Silicone (Alien Buddha 2024), Ripe (Alien Buddha 2024), Flesh (Alien Buddha 2023), September Eleventh (Middle West Press 2021), Wife and War: The Memoir (2013) and a collection of poetry blogs: September Eleventh, Wife and War, The Sustainability of Us, and Border of Heartbreak. Her writing has appeared in Voices from the Front Lines: The Pandemic and the Humanities (U of California Health and Humanities Press, 2024), The Alien Buddha's Best of 2023 (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), Alien Buddha Zine #57 (Alien Buddha Press, 2023), Things We Carry Still (Middle West Press, 2023), American Book Review, Beyond their Limits of Longing (MilSpeak Books, 2022), Diagram: An Anthology of Text, Art, and Schematic (Del Sol Press, 2003), the New York Times, Time, and Huffington Post and has received mention from the New York Times and CNN. Flynn has a BA in English and Studio Arts, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Humanities. She serves as poetry editor for The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

Reviews

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amalie's story and powerful prose have inspired me to continue my own writing. It takes courage, drive, and talent to accomplish what Amalie has in this beautiful memoir.

[Adrian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased. I was a soldier who went to Afghanistan, and wrote a memoir about the experience with special attention from my perspective to the people back home. Ms. Flynn wrote a memoir about her husband's deployment to Afghanistan, with special attention to his experience overseas. Ms. Flynn observed - as in saw and felt - 9/11, which infused her entire experience of the Global War on Terror with horrible anxiety. She honors that horror effectively through Wife and War.

Whether or not most soldiers will admit this, overseas a great deal of intellectual wattage was dedicated to the task of imagining what friends and loved ones were doing. Whether they were thinking about you, the trials and challenges they encountered, what the air smelled like, the particulars of their meals and everyday routines. Reading Ms. Flynn's memoir - written, sparingly and powerfully in poetical fashion, with attention to each word and its likely impact - is simultaneously rewarding and challenging. It took me a great deal longer than it should have to finish the book, but not because I'm a slow reader, or because I don't enjoy Ms. Flynn's writing - the passages were heavy, it was hard to move through them quickly, or absorb them. There was too much there to process, too much to remember.

So I encourage anyone and everyone with a passing interest in what it's like to go through a deployment to buy and read this book. If you're a soldier, or a soldier's spouse, or you think you might be a soldier's spouse, read this account of war. It's as true an accounting as I've encountered.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poignant and flowing. I felt like I was with her in her journey; dreamlike. Beautiful and strong.
So proud to call Amalie a dear friend.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flynn’s writing is somehow pure and honest — heart-achingly real — without being raw. In fact, the filtered, clean, truth of her writing is one of the qualities that puts Flynn in a very different category in my mind than the many military spouses out there who write.

Almost seamlessly, Flynn’s poetry moves into narrative. As I read Wife and War: The Memoir, it was as if the book kept its own time. There was a smooth cadence to Flynn’s words; a lilt and flow that made the transitions between her poetry and her narratives nearly unnoticeable.

Wife and War: The Memoir made it clear to me that Flynn is first a writer and second a writer who is married to a service member. She is no hack. No blogger calling herself a writer. Flynn is an artist of words who has been unlucky enough to not only experience 9/11, but to live in the post-9/11 military family reality of wars that don’t end when our warriors return home.

I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone; it is not a light or an easy read. I would absolutely recommend Wife and War: The Memoir to anyone who appreciates literary arts, or to anyone who wants to understand what it’s really like to send your husband off to war — and then to bring him back home.

[Andria Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, somber, thoughtful, sometimes frightening... 'Wife and War' is a personal and meaningful read. Amalie Flynn describes in poetic, heartfelt detail what she went through during and after 9/11 and throughout her husband's deployment to Afghanistan. Anyone wanting to know what life is like on the homefront during wartime would do well to read 'Wife and War,' but like all good writing, its scope encompasses more than just wartime, touching upon parenthood, love, fidelity, longing, and the distance between people who mean the world to one another. Beautiful.

[Richard Taylor]

This is a must read!

As an author who has written about love and war and coming home in Homeward Bound, I will state unequivocally that this is the best I've read. Lynn's lyrical prose and poetry should be required and desired reading for all of us trying to survive. Five stars!

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll be writing about this one on the blog soon. Highly recommended!

[Kay Tarson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Amalie's writing is gorgeous.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.