Review: 'A Widow's Story'

A WIDOW'S STORY: A Memoir
By Joyce Carol Oates
Memoir
February 2011
Ecco
ISBN: 978-0062015532

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.