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A Widow's Story

Joyce Carol Oates

3.70 · Rating details · 3,441 ratings · 568 reviews

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, Th ...more

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Hardcover, 432 pages

Published February 1st 2011 by Ecco (first published 2011)

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Oct 21, 2010 Clay added it

Shelves: adult-non-fiction

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 t ...more

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Jan 27, 2018 Kimber rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoirs

Oates' writing style, so readable that she makes the slightest most ordinary event of profound interest. Not just a tale of the experience of grief. It is more revealing about JCO and what she is like as a person. After reading "them," I couldn't help feeling like "Who could write like this?" and "What is this person like in real life?" I guess I thought she must be this confident woman who is such a great writer, I wasn't expecting her to have such low self-esteem, such self-loathing. She even ...more

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Jan 01, 2012 Amy rated it it was amazing

I must admit, I do take a bit of an issue of a book like this being rated and ranked, because it is a tale of pain as Joyce Carol Oates comes to terms with her grief, finding herself now alone, without her lifeline. How can one rate and review the pain of another and how another grieved? Particularly, or maybe especially, if one has not suffered a terrible loss themselves? Despite whether people feel she was being mean-spirited, disjointed, or maybe even a little cold, people react to loss diffe I must admit, I do take a bit of an issue of a book like this being rated and ranked, because it is a tale of pain as Joyce Carol Oates comes to terms with her grief, finding herself now alone, without her lifeline. How can one rate and review the pain of another and how another grieved? Particularly, or maybe especially, if one has not suffered a terrible loss themselves? Despite whether people feel she was being mean-spirited, disjointed, or maybe even a little cold, people react to loss differently and even if there is a common loss shared between two people, the way they experience that loss is always going to be different. In reading reviews for this book (on both GoodReads and Amazon), I found some of the projections that people were making on how they would handle things in comparison to how JCO dealt with her grief a little disturbing and, at times, without any real merit.

Although I have not suffered the death of a spouse, I have lived through the death of a child and of both of my parents. While reading this book, I was able to really connect with JCO as she traveled the long and lonely world of grief. The grief she writes about, her actions, her disbelief, the feelings of being numb, of feeling lost, of not knowing what to do, of trying to move forward and of being cemented to the ground, anchored because you are afraid if you move on, you will forget -- is amazing, heartbreaking, and true to life. Trying to decide where to bury someone, what kind of ceremony it should include, having to navigate through the paperwork, dealing with people who haven't experienced what you just had, and not really feeling like things have changed, knowing they have, and not being able to deal with them -- this is what death is like for someone left behind.

And trying to find the way to cope: whether it is through writing, getting on the internet and meeting total strangers, going back to work right away, or trying to just find a way to make it through the day.

While I have always been a fan of JCO's fiction, this book humanized her, in all of her good qualities and bad, in her triumphs, trials, and complete failures.

The things she recalls about certain days, the small details like getting a parking ticket, the way the nurse looked at her, the cats misbehavior - I related so well, because those are how you mark the days. It is with those small details that when everything else feels so surreal, you are brought back to reality and realize the loss really happened, you are really experiencing this, and this is really your life.

I highly commend JCO for sharing that vulnerability with others. Grieving and death is looked upon oddly in our society, especially in comparison with other cultures, and for JCO to be very honest about it, to not romanticize about it, and to say, "Hey, I'm not ok. This has left me lost. What do I do now?" is refreshing. This book, along with C.S Lewis' A Grief Observed, are probably the most honest books about life, love, death, and loss.

I highly recommend reading it without prejudice and projection, especially for those that have experienced a loss of their own. It is hauntingly comforting. ...more

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Mar 24, 2011 Melinda rated it did not like it

Shelves: not-worth-owning, biography

Joyce Carol Oates ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Ca... ) wrote this book after the sudden and unexpected death of her husband, Raymond Smith in 2008 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_... ). They had been married 47 years, she was 70 and he was 78. As other writers that I have read, the author uses her writing as a way to deal with the shock of death. She writes very skillfully and with great mastery. If you have ever known a widow, then you will recognize the crushing grief combined w ...more

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Apr 04, 2011 Amanda rated it it was ok

This is the story of how novelist Joyce Carol Oates lost her husband unexpectedly to a secondary infection he acquired while in the hospital. She was 70 (?), he was 77.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. I read the first half quite quickly; it was highly emotional, and highly engaging. Around the half-way point though, it was simply exhausting and redundant, even melodramatic. It may sound caustic and unfeeling, but her voice is SO highly charged that it began to sound as though she This is the story of how novelist Joyce Carol Oates lost her husband unexpectedly to a secondary infection he acquired while in the hospital. She was 70 (?), he was 77.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. I read the first half quite quickly; it was highly emotional, and highly engaging. Around the half-way point though, it was simply exhausting and redundant, even melodramatic. It may sound caustic and unfeeling, but her voice is SO highly charged that it began to sound as though she were screeching her way through the narrative, and at times it was difficult to take her seriously.

I'm surprised that Oates wrote this book, because it is not very flattering. Her grief is such that it cannot be considered normal or natural. Rather, it stems from a co-dependent relationship that left her unable to function as an individual, separate and apart from the entity that was "Ray-and-Joyce" for nearly fifty years. This book would actually be a very useful case study of co-dependency, the inability to distinguish where one person ends and the other begins. What's so sad is that Oates doesn't see this, and chose to share it with the world. It exposes her too much, I think, and I felt embarrassed for her.

If you know the rest of the story, you know that Oates remarried less than a year after her husband's passing. This, too, speaks volumes about her lack of self-efficacy. I saw a piece in Newsweek a few weeks back where well-known people, including Oates, were asked what they thought of some new gadget. It was not insignificant that she replied, "My husband Charlie . . . " She seems to define her experience through her relation to another, her intimate "other." It's no wonder, then, that when "my husband died; my world collapsed," as she writes early on in the book.

This book also supports a theory that I have that when people who live blessed, near-perfect lives get older, they have a much harder time coping with any sort of setback or loss that life sends their way. They have never honed the vital skills of resiliency and resourcefulness. They simply don't know how to survive the storms of life that others have weathered time and again.

...more

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Nov 03, 2011 Kathy rated it did not like it

Since this is a memoir it is difficult to separate the author from the quality of her writing. Perhaps this is a well written book. But as a person I could find nothing about her to respect. I do believe her loss was the greatest pain she ever suffered but I do not believe her pain supercedes all other pain anyone else has suffered by being widowed, divorced or beling alone. I found her to be weak, oh so needy, a name-dropper, completely self-absorbed, disdainful, mean-spirited and rude.

For me ...more

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Sep 15, 2011 Charles Bechtel rated it it was amazing

Read in one sitting. I was struck more as a writer than as a widower, something I daily dread becoming, by this idea: a primary repetitive act of any novelist is to invent, word by word, sentence by sentence. Failing the power to invent, a novelist may turn to what she can recall and massage that until she has what will stand in for what she wanted invented. One of the most striking characteristics of Ms. Oates work is that she invents so often, so well, and so clearly. Looking over how much she ...more

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Aug 12, 2012 Aunt rated it it was amazing

Shelves: highly-recommend

This books stands alone in searing memoirs. Not only for widows but for anyone that has lost someone who simply cannot be replaced. The most mundane things are simply too difficult to bear and oftentimes well meaning friends make the journey that much harder. The moments that registered for me were the contemplation of an eternal sleep aided by doctors who tend to treat grieving women as raving banshees to be medicated. Then, of course, the endless bargaining with whatever is out there and in co ...more

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May 24, 2011 Jenny Brown rated it it was ok

I could not finish this book. It's another of those books written by someone anointed by the literary establishment who appears to have no sense of humor, no empathy, and no sense of how spoiled and conceited they sound. Oates recounts her husband's unexpected death in a tone that pushes the reader away when they would most like to connect.

One of the perils of being a darling of the literary establishment appears to be that there are vultures there eager to profit from every word that drips off ...more

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Jun 01, 2011 Janice Williams rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir

A Widow's Story
Joyce Carol Oates

I am feeling a bit hesitant to write a Review (with a capital R) of this recently published book by Joyce Carol Oates for I am not qualified to critique her writing, only my heart and mind's reaction to the story she has told. With that caveat, I will share my impressions with you.

I purchased this book because, while I am not a widow, I am interested in how people adjust to life-altering situations; how they feel and what choices they make moving forward. Relation ...more

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Nov 25, 2010 Susan (aka Just My Op) rated it it was ok

Shelves: arc-edition, personal_memoir_biography

If you are a widow or someone else who has suffered a loss and are seeking comfort, run, run as fast as you can, away from this book. There is little, if any, comfort to be found here.

Joyce Smith, known to most of us as Joyce Carol Oates, had been married to her husband for 47 years when he died after a short illness. She was, of course, devastated, and I truly am sorry for her sorrow. Still, I really didn't like this book.

Initially, I was annoyed by all the unnecessary exclamation points and it ...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Jannekb rated it it was ok

I’ve never cared much for her widely lauded, copious fiction, and I care even less for the frail and foolish person Joyce Smith (pen name Joyce Carol Oates) portrays herself to be in this memoir. When her elderly husband, Raymond Smith, dies suddenly of pneumonia, JCO is left utterly unmoored and writes frequently of feeling suicidal, unloved, and without meaning now that her beloved is gone. While she talks a good game about stockpiling pills and lying in bed wishing to sleep and never wake up, I’ve never cared much for her widely lauded, copious fiction, and I care even less for the frail and foolish person Joyce Smith (pen name Joyce Carol Oates) portrays herself to be in this memoir. When her elderly husband, Raymond Smith, dies suddenly of pneumonia, JCO is left utterly unmoored and writes frequently of feeling suicidal, unloved, and without meaning now that her beloved is gone. While she talks a good game about stockpiling pills and lying in bed wishing to sleep and never wake up, after hundreds of pages of essentially the same series of internal dialogues, even a depressive with compulsive suicidal ideation like myself, who was so very likely to be sympathetic to her travails, is left impatiently thinking - build a bridge and get over it already. JCO then proceeds to unearth her husband’s unfinished, unpublished, and transparently autobiographical novel “Black Mass” which was written in his twenties (he died in his late seventies), and regurgitates portions and plot summaries to the horrified reader - even selections her husband crossed out and clearly did not intend to include. Raymond Smith was an editor by trade, and by all accounts a very talented one. JCO should have trusted his decisions to excise, to withhold, to NOT PUBLISH THIS NOVEL. In presenting the content of “Black Mass,” she boldly and self-righteously airs the dirty laundry of her husband’s Roman Catholic family of origin, a family she and her husband were never close to during their long marriage. Of the Catholic Church and its teaching, she writes, “How ridiculous such notions seem to us. To some of us.” JCO comes across as rude, dismissive, arrogant, and is frequently demeaning of her friends and acquaintances, many of whose expressions and acts of sympathy were apparently merely annoying to her, but she saves her strongest feelings of disdain for Roman Catholics. “We’d agreed, there is no salvation, as there is no need for salvation. The world, like the garden, simply is.” And yet, if she was willing to be saved, to trust in a power greater than herself or her husband or her career, her life might not seem to be, in the end, merely and abjectly casting about in the “inifinite whirl, alone.” Perhaps this is what Godlessness and an outright rejection of familial bonds creates: meaninglessness. Did she expect her seventy-eight year old husband would live forever? Did she never stop to look ahead, to consider the realities of human existence? We are all going to die, sooner or later. This is not a book of tragedy, or survival of tragedy. It tries to be, in one final sentence, but there was no build to that last, false note – aside from brief moments in her husband’s garden, where she believes his spirit resides, but JCO has made it clear that she does not believe in souls and spirits and afterlife, merely the long black silence of not-being. It is not surprising that such a belief system would generate such a long, fruitless, and painfully bitter memoir as this. ...more

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Oct 16, 2017 Rachel Aranda rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: library-rentals

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Sep 11, 2012 Joan rated it did not like it

First, I must say that I find JCO's fiction to be too disturbing to read. After reading one of her novels in which a group of teenagers kidnap a random person off the street and proceed to torture him, I figured that there are better ways to spend my time.

However, "A Widow's Story" is the kind of book, a memoir about grief, that I usually devour. My 9 year old daughter died suddenly in 2006, so I usually like to learn from ways that others have dealt with life's big losses.

In this case, I mostl ...more

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Jun 25, 2011 Tessa rated it it was amazing

The title of this book describes exactly what it is. Joyce Carol Oates takes the reader on a journey through the intimate pain of losing her husband after decades of marriage. Unafraid as a writer, Oates allows us genuine glimpses into her struggle to live through the days of her husband's illness, death, and the following year of her life. I feel like this was a "right place, right time" book for me. I was genuinely surprised by how completely it captured my attention and inhabited my heart. I ...more

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Jan 15, 2016 Joan Colby rated it really liked it

The somewhat jumbled structure of this book accurately depicts the conflicting emotions one feels after a loss, such as Oates experienced when her husband Ray unexpectedly died after a siege of pneumonia. There is a great deal of repetition, but that’s how grief is, unrelenting. At times, A Widow’s Story seems like a prolonged howl—Oates opens herself to the reader, but the experience is almost painful. It is surprising to learn that Oates was a girl who went from her father’s house to her husba ...more

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May 11, 2011 Hoosier rated it liked it

After reading the 400+ pages of "A Widow's Story" written by Joyce Smith, aka Joyce Carol Oats (JCO), I have no idea whether JCO intended to write a book to honor the memory of her husband, Ray; to talk about her life as a widow; or to recount her various successes. While JCO does a beautiful job, at times, discussing the aftermath of her life after Ray's death, the unclear focus of the book detracts from the story. I have difficulty recommending this book unless one wants to learn more about JC After reading the 400+ pages of "A Widow's Story" written by Joyce Smith, aka Joyce Carol Oats (JCO), I have no idea whether JCO intended to write a book to honor the memory of her husband, Ray; to talk about her life as a widow; or to recount her various successes. While JCO does a beautiful job, at times, discussing the aftermath of her life after Ray's death, the unclear focus of the book detracts from the story. I have difficulty recommending this book unless one wants to learn more about JCO's life.

The book begins with JCO's recount of a trip she took to the hospital to visit Ray. At the end of the brief hospital trip, JCO finds an extemely rude letter that had been left on her windshield that serves to shed light on the insensibility of some people to the hardships of others. She describes her thoughts on this note in a short paragraph at the end of the chapter. I found that these personal stories inserted by JCO in italics at the end of many chapters were the most enjoyable part of the book. For example, JCO showed insight when she described that many widows may call their home voicemail after their husband's death only to hear their husband's voice on the voicemail recording.

JCO describes herself as an independant women who lived a life apart, both mentally and physically, from her husband. JCO visited Ray in the hospital everyday for only short periods of time and she and Ray worked on their own projects during most of those visits. JCO took many business trips away from Ray during their marriage and they only ever shared good news with each other for fear of hurting the other person with bad news. After Ray's death, however, JCO contemplates suicide and devotes over half of the book to her suicidal ideation. I therefore found it difficult to reconcile the post-Ray JCO with the pre-Ray JCO.

Furthermore, I cannot determine if JCO comprises her morals only due to the devastation she suffers from Ray's death or she truly is a callous person. For example, JCO throws away most of the sympathy gift baskets that she receives, even before opening them, and does not read many of the condolence notes sent to her. She describes people that send her books to review or comment on as "predator sharks" and cannot believe that "their naivete in imagining that any publication of theirs, any achievement, will make the slightest difference in their lives, or in the lives of others." JCO also forgets to let one of her elderly cats in on a cold night and the cat dies from frostbite.
...more

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Mar 09, 2011 Laura T rated it did not like it

I read glowing literary reviews of this book, so when I finally got around to reading it, I expected to enjoy it, as much as one can enjoy a book about such a sad subject. I was disappointed. Listen, JCO has my utmost sympathy for her terrible loss. One of my worst nightmares is losing my husband. My annoyance with the book is not with her grief, because of course, anyone would be terribly grieved in their heart after such a loss. My annoyance is with her belly-button gazing, her sympathy reject ...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Fred Moramarco rated it really liked it

"I can wade Grief/Whole pools of it" wrote Emily Dickinson, and Joyce Carol Oates does a considerable amount of wading in her deeply felt memoir, "A Widow's Story," written in the three years following her husband, Raymond Smith's, death in February, 2008. Although her remarriage just a bit over a year later certainly brings a happy ending to this grief chronicle, it is nowhere mentioned in the book. The Times reviewer Janet Maslin made this notion a central focus of her review, and though it is "I can wade Grief/Whole pools of it" wrote Emily Dickinson, and Joyce Carol Oates does a considerable amount of wading in her deeply felt memoir, "A Widow's Story," written in the three years following her husband, Raymond Smith's, death in February, 2008. Although her remarriage just a bit over a year later certainly brings a happy ending to this grief chronicle, it is nowhere mentioned in the book. The Times reviewer Janet Maslin made this notion a central focus of her review, and though it is a legitimate issue, Maslin treats it with an unpalatable meanness. Perhaps she was influenced by these sentences cruelly juxtaposed in Oates' Wikipedia entry: "Since my husband's unexpected death, I really have very little energy[...]My marriage--my love for my husband--seems to have come first in my life, rather than my writing. Set beside his death, the future of my writing scarcely interests me at the moment." In early 2009 Oates married Professor Charles Gross of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton.

Surely one is glad to learn that the pain and anguish obviously experienced and so fully described in "A Widow's Story," subsided relatively quickly and that she was able to "move on" and find a new chapter in her life. But her memoir deals primarily with the several months after the shock of Smith's "unexpected" death. Oates repeats the word "unexpected" many times in the book, and it made me aware of how deeply our American denial of aging and death is. When a man is age 79, as Smith was when he died, he has already lived a year or two beyond the average life expectancy for American men, yet his death is still regarded as unexpected, as though we have somehow triumphed over mortality.

Because women outlive men by nearly a decade or more, the widow's grief memoir has become something of a genre of its own. I've been writing a series of essays on aging, and I've read a half-dozen or more of them in the last few years, starting with Joan Didion's stunning "The Year of Magical Thinking," about the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through Anne Roiphe's "Epilogue," Eleanor Clift's "Two Weeks of Life," Sandra Gilbert's "Wrongful Death," and Antonia Fraser's "Must You Go?" the latter about her life with Harold Pinter. In fact, Oates' memoir makes me think of the phenomenon as not only a genre but an industry. On the back cover of my advance edition of the book the publisher touts a huge marketing campaign including print, radio, online media, a 13-city author tour and even an "Outreach to Grief Awareness Groups." Death not only thrives in America; it sells.

Despite that, this book appears a searingly honest account of a major life trauma, although several aspects of it kept nagging at me as I read it. Nearly all of these grief memoirs give me a sense of how proprietary people are about their own grief. "A Widow's Story" is certainly no exception. Although death and loss are as common as beach sand, I came away from the book admiring the first few sections of it (that I read serialized The New Yorker) more than I did the remaining more than three-hundred pages which are characterized by a good deal of repetition, a lot of "widow" definition, and a prevailing sense that nothing like this wonderfully devoted couple ever existed before. There is also a great deal about how separated the writer of this book feels from her own persona, the highly productive "Joyce Carol Oates," but very little about how Raymond Smith might have felt being "Mr. Joyce Carol Oates."
There are, however, beneath the surface, several clear indications that things might not have been quite so bucolic as they seem. First of all, this couple, who spent hardly any time apart from one another since their meeting in 1960, avoided many important issues that cropped up between them. Oates said that Smith never liked to discuss his relationship with his father, he never liked to talk about anything negative, he never discussed his strict religious upbringing and the influence of religion on his life, and most significantly, he never read any of her fiction. This struck me as especially unusual, since he was himself a literary critic and editor, and certainly must have had some curiosity about his wife's work. But the reasons for the avoidance become clearer as we learn about an unfinished novel that Smith worked on and off on throughout his life. So here is a man unable to complete a single work of fiction in his 79 years of life married to the most prolific fiction writer in America. Hmmm. We get very little inkling of how he felt about this. Oates avoids (or withholds) reading the manuscript of this novel until the very last chapters of her book, and when she does she discovers things about her husband and their relationship of which she was never before aware.

But all this is carping, because this may be Joyce Carol Oates' best book (I can't really say because I have only read about a half dozen of them). In any case, it's the first book she has written where we get inside her own nerve endings rather than her vivid imagination, and we experience with her the disorientation that the end of a major life chapter can bring. Although she ultimately realizes, as many do when they learn something startling about someone they thought they knew well, that between even the most intimate among us there is "something unknowable, inaccessible. A stubborn intractable intransigent otherness." I'm very glad to have read it because it bridges a bit of that intransigent otherness at least between her readers and herself.
...more

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May 03, 2011 Lynne Perednia rated it really liked it

For 48 years and 25 days, Joyce Carol Oates thought of herself not as the author Joyce Carol Oates, but as Joyce Smith, wife of Raymond Smith, professor and editor of The Ontario Review. That thinking, that life, is abruptly shattered in the middle of a February night in 2008 when she receives a call from the hospital where she had taken her pneumonia-stricken husband a few days earlier, summoning her to get there quicky because her husband was still alive.

When she got there, he wasn't.

The guilt For 48 years and 25 days, Joyce Carol Oates thought of herself not as the author Joyce Carol Oates, but as Joyce Smith, wife of Raymond Smith, professor and editor of The Ontario Review. That thinking, that life, is abruptly shattered in the middle of a February night in 2008 when she receives a call from the hospital where she had taken her pneumonia-stricken husband a few days earlier, summoning her to get there quicky because her husband was still alive.

When she got there, he wasn't.

The guilt, the grief, the bewilderment, the anger and the depression of those first few hours, days and weeks are chronicled in A Widow's Story. The anguish is unrelenting and the chronicling deal with both the minutiae and large-scale ramifications to daily living and to one's sense of self and value of living.

Reaction to the memoir has centered on comparing this work to Joan Didion's brilliant memoir when she lost both her husband and daughter, and to Oates's remarrying soon after her first husband's death. It's been uniformly negative, with a level of disdain puzzling to someone who has only read a few short stories and one novel of the author's. They had macabre elements but also poignant moments. It's possible to see the curiosity of the author behind the stories, wondering how people would feel if placed in such a situation or how different characteristics would produce different reactions. Those explorations are legitimate reasons to write fiction and should certainly be welcome within the scope of a major reason for fiction to exist: To explore the human condition in its myriad complicated, glorious forms. Oates displays the same kind of intellectual curiosity to her own reactions when her husband dies.

Oates may well be bringing up Didion when she writes late in her book about another well-known writer, a friend, whose husband died and who wrote a best-selling memoir about the experience. The friend writes a letter to Oates about being stunned and how getting over that was a huge obstacle. Oates uses that as a springboard to wonder how much of grief is vanity. She returns to a trope she uses time and again throughout the book: That the widow should be punished, should be ridiculed, should be made miserable by the judgment of others.

While many other writers would stick with the original idea about being stunned, and a few others might take that as the foundation for a treatise on guilt, Oates instead goes into the territory of her insomnia, the medication she is fitfully taking for it and how taking it takes away discernment. Perhaps this is the basis for much criticism of Oates's writing. She certainly piles it on in this book, one idea going to another to another to another in non-linear fashion. Some readers may want to let each idea have its own space and time.

But just as Oates's story is not Didion's, neither are they going to view their experiences in the same way or write about them in the same way. So to criticize Oates for not writing like Didion is to criticize her for not being another person.

Even more major has been the criticism that Oates does not reveal in her memoir that she remarried 11 months after her husband's death. In the final pages, this man is mentioned obliquely as an unexpected guest to a dinner party in her home, that her life will be altered after that evening and that anything which is a gift is given not because it is deserved but because it is a gift.

Oates gives the reason why she would remarry earlier on, though, quoting a letter she wrote to a friend two months after her husband's death. She writes about how hard it is to live alone, that she cannot concentrate and that she worries about being able to keep on living this way. She also writes that she would likely still not be alive if not for her friends. So it's no wonder she sought solace by marrying again. Some people thrive on solitude, some do not. Some honor their late spouses by craving the continuance of the kind of life they led with their spouse.

For other people to condemn Oates because she didn't react the same way that Didion did, or that they think she should react, is a petty reaction. To be condemned for not being someone else or for not seeing things with the same perspective as the person doing the judging is to deny the humanity of the person condemned. Oates, with her insistence on the widow being punished, appears to know in advance she would be judged harshly. And she includes events that do not put her in a good light, such as one concerning one of their cats who preferred Ray over her, but which a good novelist would include in a book about a flawed character.

Yes, Oates's memoir is bloated and repetitive. But it also is a chronicle of a very low point in someone's life and how she has chosen to recount it. She does honor her late husband by conveying what a kind and gentle man he was, by writing about his garden, his work and his unfinished, unpublished novel that she reads after his death. In writing about that novel, Oates also shows how she begins to come to terms with her husband's death by answering for herself questions she has about him after he dies. Writers interested in the process of creating fiction should be drawn to the story of Raymond Smith's lifelong work in progress and how a prolific novelist looks at that work.

A Widow's Story may be far from a "perfect" representation, no matter how a reader defines perfection, but it is a worthwhile testament to what the experience of sudden widowhood meant in the early going to one woman.
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Apr 19, 2011 Meg Ulmes rated it it was amazing

When I first saw the advertisement for this memoir in the New York Times Book Review, I knew that I had to read it. Several weeks later when I found it on the new book shelf in my local library, I knew that it would be a challenge for me to read because I am still going through the grieving process. When I scanned the first few pages of the memoir and discovered that Ms. Oates' husband had died within 11 days of my own in 2008, I knew the book would speak to me.

And it has. I have been challenged ...more

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Sep 24, 2017 Jacqueline Masumian rated it really liked it

This book devastates. Not only because of the subject matter, widowhood, but because Joyce Carol Oates' exquisite writing digs deep into the horrors of unexpected loss, a tangle of painful feelings and severe aloneness. When her husband dies unexpectedly, Oates is plagued by an otherworldly sense of grief. She alternately struggles and flirts with thoughts of suicide. Insomnia nearly destroys her, and she wrestles with fear of addiction to sleeping pills and antidepressants.

Not recommended for ...more

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Feb 10, 2011 Suzanne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir

I tend to not enjoy reading memoirs, which Joyce Carol Oates describes in this poignant book as at once the most seductive and dangerous of genres. At their worst, they come across as whiny (look at poor me and the vicissitudes I've overcome...) and at best, self-congratulatory. But then every so often one comes along, like Ann Patchett's memoir of a friendship in "Truth and Beauty", and this book by Oates about surviving the death of her husband.

At some point, most of us will survive the loss o I tend to not enjoy reading memoirs, which Joyce Carol Oates describes in this poignant book as at once the most seductive and dangerous of genres. At their worst, they come across as whiny (look at poor me and the vicissitudes I've overcome...) and at best, self-congratulatory. But then every so often one comes along, like Ann Patchett's memoir of a friendship in "Truth and Beauty", and this book by Oates about surviving the death of her husband.

At some point, most of us will survive the loss of a loved one -- a parent, a child, a spouse. It's almost banal. And yet out of this experience, Oates has crafted a book that is unsparing of herself and yet a tribute to the value of loving and being loved. The death of her husband, Ray Smith, literally unmoors her, and she drifts far away from her former life, uncertain of whether she wants to return to it or if she ever can. Thoughts of suicide tempt her -- a basilisk figure lurking in the edge of her vision eggs her on, repeatedly, reminding her that she is a valueless person on her own -- even as she battles through the practicalities (disposing of the endless Harry & David "sympathy baskets", coping with distraught cats, reading a stream of sympathy letters.

What struck me as most authentic and valid in this memoir is something that we should all try to remember (including the reviewer who described the author as arrogant and self-pitying): we cannot ever see inside of another's soul to fully understand the torment they are going through. If we are honest, we don't want to. What Oates has done in this memoir is to force us to confront the magnitude of the pain that the death of a spouse of 47 years brings in its wake; a pain that can be amplified rather than muted by the well-meaning gestures and platitudes of others. For whom do we exist? That's a question that Oates tackles indirectly and her verdict is mixed. Despite pondering suicide (periodically, throughout this memoir, she pauses to contemplate just how many pills she has available, and rejoices when she can obtain more) Oates opts for survival, of some kind. But it's as much despite the care and attention of her friends (appreciated, yet never a panacea as no panacea exists) as because of it.

This book is more an act of catharsis than it is one that is intended to be helpful to others in similar situations. But it's also the most honest I've ever read about the way death of a loved one pushes one into oneself, into a state of mind and being that others too often dismiss as "selfish" or self-absorbed.

I didn't find this book depressing, for it is as at least as much about the tremendous power and endurance of love as it as about the sorrows and traumas associated with its loss. As we age, we realize how inextricably the two are linked, and Oates is to be praised for not letting us get away with thinking that we will find the process inspirational or ultimately of value. It's not an easy book to read, but it's powerful, and it goes on to my list of the best books of the year that I've read so far. I wouldn't recommend that anyone who has recently lost a loved one read it -- it may rub salt in the wound, may irritate or anger someone who feels and reacts to that loss in a different manner -- but anyone over the age of 40 should read it, as well as anyone who wants to be reassured that a memoir isn't just a "look how great I am" book in disguise. I've rated it 5 stars.

Full disclosure: I obtained a copy of the book from the publishers via NetGalley.com ...more

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Oct 16, 2017 Rachel Aranda rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: library-rentals, first-reads, audiobooks

This is quite a complicated book to review as it deals with one woman's emotional journey from when she first thinks about how she and her husband could have died until the point when her husband does die and her fear becomes a reality.

The strongest part of "A Widow's Story" are the emotional connections that we all have when we lose someone we love. While I haven't lost my romantic partner to death (knock on wood and thank goodness) I have lost quite a few people who have helped shape me into This is quite a complicated book to review as it deals with one woman's emotional journey from when she first thinks about how she and her husband could have died until the point when her husband does die and her fear becomes a reality.

The strongest part of "A Widow's Story" are the emotional connections that we all have when we lose someone we love. While I haven't lost my romantic partner to death (knock on wood and thank goodness) I have lost quite a few people who have helped shape me into the person I am currently. A lot of what Mrs. Oates-Smith writes about I understood. Noticing how we could have skipped "minor things" (like eating and sleeping) in order to spend time with our loved one. Leaving and entering areas that they used to be in and how it rips a part of your heart and soul with how unnatural it feels doing this. There are other moments throughout this book had me shaking my head up and down at how I've done the exact same thing. I understand that there are moments that a person doesn't want to share but I feel like there were emotional parts missing at this book. It would have been nice to have had Mrs. Oates-Smith share just a little bit more of her emotions instead of giving us a play-by-play of her thought process. In my opinion, you need to mix your thoughts and emotions together in order to fully share in your writings when writing a memoir, and this book just didn't do that well sometimes.

Even though the emotional side is taken care of I felt that the writing wasn't the best that I've read. It's a memoir about one of the most difficult thing to ever go through so I feel like I can give a small break about the writing. Still this is an established author so I feel like the writing shouldn't have been as blunt and sometimes harsh as it should have been. Again this might have been due to what I wrote about how Mrs. Oates-Smith tended to write her thoughts more than emotions.

The narrator, Ellen Parker, does a good job of capturing the hollow emotions that come from being exhausted of going through losing a partner and as email correspondents. I'm not sure I would ever seek an audiobook out that she's read though. Ms. Parker has a certain dull tone in her voice that while fitting for a book on death and mourning I can't see fitting for other audiobooks.

All in all this is a hard book to rate but I'd give the print version a 2 star rating as it was pretty difficult to continue reading. I put the book down many times to do other things. The audio version gets a 2.5 star rating was easier to follow but still easy to put down. I'd suggest people listen to the audio version over the printed version and that rarely happens. ...more

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Mar 03, 2012 Judith rated it it was ok

I am fond of Oates fiction for the most part but this is the first nonfiction work of hers I have read. It was rated as one of the top ten books of 2011 by the LA Times, and I was interested in it because it is a memoir. In this book, she tells how she managed to deal with the sudden death of her beloved husband. I hardly feel qualified to criticize an author who is so talented, diverse, and prolific as she. It also feels cruel to criticize a memoir so heartfelt and painfully rendered as this on I am fond of Oates fiction for the most part but this is the first nonfiction work of hers I have read. It was rated as one of the top ten books of 2011 by the LA Times, and I was interested in it because it is a memoir. In this book, she tells how she managed to deal with the sudden death of her beloved husband. I hardly feel qualified to criticize an author who is so talented, diverse, and prolific as she. It also feels cruel to criticize a memoir so heartfelt and painfully rendered as this one. Having so qualified my review, I have to say it was a pretty depressing book, and too painfully slow to recommend it to anyone I know.

I did find it interesting that her experience so mirrored Joan Didion's book on the passing of her husband. Both of them worked so closely with their husbands their whole lives. In Oates case, she and her husband even shared a car. It's hard to imagine a relationship so close that you only need one car between your spouse and yourself. I also enjoyed reading about how much she enjoyed teaching her college classes. She was angry and critical of many of the people who surrounded her, but she was always so cheerful and positive about her students and her teaching experience.

It was also interesting how she dealt with the condolences she received from friends and colleagues. She was inexplicably infuriated by gift baskets and in particular with "Harry & David" packages. As far as I could tell, she was insulted that people thought she could be consoled by food. So she threw out all of the packages of food that arrived. She didn't even bother to give them away, but threw them unopened in the trash. She actually went to the trouble of going out and buying an extra trash can to hold all the extra food baskets and boxes.

I loved the parts where she related the joy of her married life with her husband. She adored him, and it's always interesting to see inside another couple's marriage. She said he rarely, if ever, read her fiction. And they did not bring up unhappy subjects to each other because they never wanted to upset each other. Different strokes. ...more

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May 05, 2011 Lauren rated it it was ok

Two things about this book 1) I'm 250 pages in and throwing in the towel 2) I think this book has made stop liking Joyce Carol Oates.

I would not recommend this book to anyone just for the pure fact that it is about a wife losing her husband (of something like 40 years) to an unexpected death. However, if you are like me and like reading memoirs about this topic I would recommend the first 1/3 of this book. After that it is slow and loses your interest.

But to enjoy this book you also really nee ...more

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Feb 25, 2011 Ellie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: relationships, death, loss, bio-memoir, writers, 2011ind-chal200bks, non-fiction

odd, jarring sound of referring to "the widow" in the 3rd person

painful, awkward memoir; sometimes so powerful, sometimes so annoying. Like life itself-and death. And grief.

I will write a review-some day. It is a difficult book to integrate into oneself & evokes such jagged and conflicting reactions that I'm not sure when I'll be able to calmly "evaluate" it.

Sorry I read it? Grateful I did.

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Feb 15, 2011 Eve rated it it was amazing

At age 72, with 115 books, numerous essays, short stories, and being a professor at Princeton, I never really thought too much about Joyce Carol Oates's personal life maybe because I imagined her work was her life. It turns out she had an incredibly close and fulfilling marriage of 47 years to Raymond Smith before his sudden and untimely death on February 18, 2008, three years ago.

Since I have read some of her work, I knew that a memoir by JCO (yes, she refers to her writer persona at times in At age 72, with 115 books, numerous essays, short stories, and being a professor at Princeton, I never really thought too much about Joyce Carol Oates's personal life maybe because I imagined her work was her life. It turns out she had an incredibly close and fulfilling marriage of 47 years to Raymond Smith before his sudden and untimely death on February 18, 2008, three years ago.

Since I have read some of her work, I knew that a memoir by JCO (yes, she refers to her writer persona at times in this way, but thinks of her true self as Joyce Smith) would be riveting, surprising and revelatory. Just getting inside her head was a fascinating enough prospect for me. I don't know about you, but her kind of unbelievably prolific output brings to mind someone who must be a brilliant, solitary person removed from the world Emily Dickinson-like. One of the revelations in reading A Widow's Story: A Memoir is that Joyce Carol Oates is not a solitary person made entirely of stories. In this memoir, she is a wife whose whole world collapses when her husband is suddenly taken ill and dies ... and happens to be a very successful author.

The shock of losing him without any warning or preparation, having to pick herself up just to survive, memories of her long marriage, uncovering the secrets of a husband she thought she knew, facing the future alone... all of this is told with Oates's characteristic keenly observant eye for details. For it is in the private, unsparing details, details sometimes small yet very telling, which she shares that fully conveys Oates's devastating loss.

“Of all deliveries I have come to most dread those from Harry and David those ubiquitous entrepreneurs of fateful occasions---Sympathy Gift Boxes adorned with Sympathy Ribbons hurtled in all directions across the continent. Why are people sending me these things? Do they imagine that grief will be assuaged by chocolate-covered truffles, pate de foie gras, pepperoni sausages?...I am frantic to get rid of this party food---I am infuriated, disgusted, ashamed---for of course I should be grateful, I should be writing thank you notes like a proper widow, I should not be weeping and muttering to myself in icy rain at the end of our driveway bareheaded and shivering in a rage of futility against my husband You did this!—you went outside in the freezing cold, I know you did, this is exactly what you did, when I was away at Riverside you did this very thing, you were careless with your life, you threw away both our lives with your carelessness contracting a cold, a cold that became pneumonia, pneumonia that became cardiopulmonary collapse---”

And because it is Oates, there are conscious breaks in the first person narrative when she intersperses brief third person observations as if she were an outsider writing an imagined story – by referring to herself as “The Widow.” This is not just her story, but every widow's story, that her grief is such that it erases her identity as professor, writer, wife; she has become The Widow. But curiously, it brought to mind my previous impression of Oates - that of the writer who even as she is experiencing a catastrophic loss can't help but narrate it in her head.

Painfully honest, she explores the idea of suicide, calling it "the basilisk" - an imagined creature in her life, watching her with a baleful stare. The temptation, the ease, the different possibilities - nothing is off-limits.

“From a short distance---If I shut my eyes, I can see it clearly---the lizard-like creature is regarding me, its flailing prey, that cannot escape; I see now that it’s a living thing, an actual stone-colored reptile of the size of a bullfrog, with remarkable eyes, hypnotic eyes fixed upon me. You are finished. You are dead and done for, why don’t you just give up.”

Some of the experiences she shares aren't universal, such as the personal e-mails she sends and receives from her friends composed of who's who – Gloria Vanderbilt, Edmund White, Gail Godwin, Elaine Pagels. It is Godwin who actually provides Oates with the most memorable advice/consolation:

“Suffer, Joyce. Ray was worth it.”

...more

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Jul 02, 2015 Christine Fay rated it it was amazing

Shelves: memoir, non-fiction

I was not even a quarter of the way through this masterpiece when I had to stop to write about it. Her choice of words is inspiring. “Hopeful is our solace in the face of mortality.” Wow. Here’s another bit of inspiring wisdom. She has put into words how I have been feeling about my life this past year. “The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our liv I was not even a quarter of the way through this masterpiece when I had to stop to write about it. Her choice of words is inspiring. “Hopeful is our solace in the face of mortality.” Wow. Here’s another bit of inspiring wisdom. She has put into words how I have been feeling about my life this past year. “The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events” (Oates 19). Enough said . . . for now . . .

I have finished this book in three days; I could not put it down; I even read it at night, when I usually don’t read. Instead of watching television, I sat upon my big, blue comfy chair and read that book until it was time to wander off to sleep. In fact, I could not bring myself to do anything else until I finished it. It was that good. I would have to say that Joyce Carol Oates and Wallace Stegner are two authors that I can say allow the reader to fully occupy their worlds – to become one with the writer emotionally, spiritually, even in a work of fiction or non-fiction. Their writing styles are so complete and encompassing – truly a treasure in the world of pulp fiction.

From page 20, “So much of our behavior – our “personalities” – is so constructed. The survival of the individual, in the service of the species. Our great American philosopher William James has said – We have as many personalities as there are people who know us.”

Wow. So true. What, then is the personality, but only that which exists when others are around to pass judgment. Oh, he is friendly, oh, she is sociable, and witty, and charming, or depressed, and so forth. Very interesting concept. I can tell she was a philosophy major. I love these kinds of books that make you stop and think.

On page 42, when Joyce was looking at a watercolor painting, she imagined, “how much happier visual artists must be, than writers – writers and poets – we whose connections to the world are purely verbal, linear – through language we are beseeching others who are strangers to us not merely to read what we have written but to absorb it, be moved by it, to feel –.” This is my criteria for a truly great book. Books can possibly change our lives by changing our thinking. I think there may be at least 30 books give or take that have inspired thusly, including this one. The thing is, I usually bounce one off the top 30 once I read a really good one. Should I just keep adding to it instead? Perhaps. I do want to get my hands on some more of Oates’ stuff though. It’s wonderful, and I didn’t realize how prolific she was.
...more

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May 18, 2013 Nicole rated it it was amazing

I have had this book on my shelf for awhile but avoided reading it for several reasons. I wasn't thrilled with the last two books I read by Oates (Black Girl, White Girl and My Sister, My Love) I thought the book would be derivative (what else is there to say about widowhood after Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking?), and I just didn't feel like reading a depressing book. I picked it up the day before yesterday because I have been thinking about friends of ours, a lovely,smart couple with th I have had this book on my shelf for awhile but avoided reading it for several reasons. I wasn't thrilled with the last two books I read by Oates (Black Girl, White Girl and My Sister, My Love) I thought the book would be derivative (what else is there to say about widowhood after Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking?), and I just didn't feel like reading a depressing book. I picked it up the day before yesterday because I have been thinking about friends of ours, a lovely,smart couple with three smart, beautiful, creative children. Their youngest daughter died a few weeks ago. She was just thirteen. She had a heart condition, but her sudden death was totally unexpected. She got the flu and a few days later she died at home in her sleep in the middle of the night. I have been thinking of her mom, wondering how she manages to get out of bed in the morning, how she can function during the day and how she can go on living. I think to myself, she probably decided to go on living for the sake of her other children. So I decided, maybe it is time to read this book. I read most of it in one day and it has been haunting me since I started. The book recounts the trauma of the six month period after Joyce Smith's husband dies. Not Joyce Carol Oates. Joyce Smith, wife of Raymond Smith. The book is a chronicle of Joyce Smith's mental state, basically a runaway train of hopelessness, terror, disbelief, guilt, and despair. Just when you think you have had enough , she brings in someone else's story--a former student of hers whose brilliance and mania make an impression, her husband's family whose lives are full of secrets. I don't think I would have appreciated this book twenty years ago, but now, I have a greater sense of the value of my relationships. I get it. This is not really a memoir by JCO, the celebrated author. This is the diary of Mrs. Joyce Smith, a woman whose life was entwined with her husband's for almost fifty years. He was her anchor and losing him has completely unhinged her. On the other hand, it is also pure JCO--a beautiful, raw, psychological masterwork and a fitting tribute to a man she clearly admired and wanted to memorialize in her own brilliant way. ...more

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About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Laure ...more

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“There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.” — 99 likes

“Our great American philosopher William James has said - "We have as many personalities as there are people who know us." To which I would add "We have no personalities unless there are people who know us. Unless there are people we hope to convince that we deserve to exist.” — 11 likes

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