A Widow's Story A Memoir (eBook): Oates, Joyce Carol: 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.
- “Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.” But then I turned back a couple of pages and noted the date of the last portion of the book: August 2008. Her husband had died in February of 2008.
- A Widow's Story illuminates one woman's struggle to comprehend a life without the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. As never before, Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of 'death-duties,' and the solace of friendship.
Photograph by Murdo Macleod.
Joyce Carol Oates is hardly an author who needs introduction. Her famously vast and varied oeuvre—more than fifty novels and hundreds of short stories, as well as critical essays, books of poetry, and plays—ensures not only that no two readers will have the same opinion of her but that the same reader may well have more than one. And yet, as we learn in A Widow’s Story, her recently published account of the year following her husband’s death, outside of the public eye she was not “Joyce Carol Oates” but “Joyce Smith,” a devoted wife whose husband, Raymond Smith, had read little of her fiction. I asked her about this divide between public and private personas, the difficulty of writing while grief stricken, and the role of the woman as elegist in a conversation conducted recently over e-mail.
Early in this memoir, you write that “the widow inhabits a tale not of her own telling.” Is A Widow’s Story an attempt to reclaim that tale? Endorphin game free download.
The memoir is assembled from journal entries, which were driven by the “surprises” of the day. When I began recording the hospital vigil, I did not know the ending. Only two or three chapters were written in a more conventional way, as flashbacks or background information, about Detroit in the 1960s for instance. I began the memoir—deliberately—in mid-summer 2009, when I found that I was not able to imagine a novel at that time. Since I was haunted by this material, and had hundreds of pages of notes, it seemed quite practical to write what I could, beginning with the first of the really startling, to me, epiphanies—“The Message.”
Has writing fiction gotten any easier in the three years since your husband’s death?
I’ve just finished a young-adult novel that was, in fact, much easier to imagine and to write than a previous novel I’d completed a few months ago. It isn’t always clear, in writing, whether one is having a difficult time because of an emotional situation, or whether the project is just difficult! But I do love to write young-adult fiction, with its very different agendas and voices—a sense that one is communicating with readers far more directly and significantly than in adult fiction. In adult, literary fiction, the voice of the novel is mediated and deliberate and meant to be original; in young-adult fiction, the voice is usually direct, without much metaphor or figures of speech, geared toward dialogue, and with a clear, unfolding plot and a minimum of background exposition and introspection.
You discuss at one point the possibility of building a novel from the drafts of your husband’s unfinished novel. Is this still a possibility that intrigues you?
No, a novel belongs to the novelist.
You write extensively about the ways in which you “impersonate” the author Joyce Carol Oates, who is not the same as Joyce Smith—who is, in fact, not even a noun, but rather, “a descriptive term.” What has the experience of writing as JCO about Joyce Smith been like?
My personal life is very different from my professional life; this is true for all writers, and artists, I’m sure. But my professional life was crucial to me, to keep me from deteriorating in a static domestic situation in which there was little joy but much, much unrewarding effort—the “death duties” which are so crushing in the wake of a death in the family, and the effort of continuing to maintain a household. Teaching and traveling as Joyce Carol Oates provided me with opportunity to maintain alliances with other people, though often I did not really feel strong enough to leave home.
You say that your writing life “is not a life” and that “my life is my life as a woman,” yet writing is an incredibly time-consuming task. Is there a sense of regret at having spent so much time on the writing life?
No—this is hard to explain, I think. In my life—domestic, familial—I was with a man who also worked, at times for longer hours than I did. We were both working, and when Ray died so suddenly, the work was all that remained, but it seemed, and it was, very unsatisfying when I was alone. Yet if Ray had miraculously returned, within a few days we would have taken up again our old, familiar schedule, which made us very happy.
Gmod glasses. Do you caution your students about the dangers of devoting yourself so fully to something that is “not a life”?
I would never suggest to anyone that writing or art should be primary in their lives. We really don’t have to choose between, as William Butler Yeats has said, “the life and the work.” We can have both, to a degree.
Late in the book, you write, “Now I am beginning to realize—this memoir is a pilgrimage.” Does finishing the book end the pilgrimage, or is there a sense in which the pilgrimage is never over, in the same way in which the widow never really “gets over” the husband’s death?
In the days and weeks following my husband’s death, virtually every hour seemed to bring with it a surprise of some sort—a jolt, an epiphany. It was very strange, like a meteor shower. Yet often the epiphanies were truths/platitudes of a kind that, in theory, everyone knows but, in reality, very few actually understand. That the weeks and months were a kind of pilgrimage seemed to me true, but of course there is no natural end to a pilgrimage, and you are right to suggest that one never “gets over” the loss.
However, I wanted to memorialize Raymond Smith: many writers knew him, whom he’d published in our literary magazine and press, but generally, Ray was not known, and I was eager—perhaps desperate—to correct this. Posthumously, Bill Henderson’s 2009 Puschcart Prize was dedicated to Ray’s memory, which would have been very touching to him.
Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates. Photograph by Eva Häggdahl.
You write about the woman as “the elegist … the repository of memory.” In what sense was this true in your marriage?
My husband was just not one to look back with nostalgia; he did not “remember” in any concerted way. If we took photos, I was the one to carefully annotate them and put them in albums. It may be that, generally, women are just more nostalgic than men. I did want to memorialize Raymond Smith, out of a fear that he would be forgotten. He was a modest man who would be absolutely, totally astonished at all the attention he has drawn (posthumously).
Adobe audition linux. This is, unlike most of your books, deeply personal. Do you find it more difficult to write about yourself than to write fiction? How does the process compare?
It is both personal and yet, oddly, impersonal: I was writing the story of the widow, which I had not experienced before, and can see now is a universal human experience. In its first incarnation the memoir was to be titled A Widow’s Handbook—which remains now, in a kind of abbreviated fossil form, as a single chapter at the very end of the memoir. A purely private, personal memoir would not interest me much; it was the overlapping between my experience and others that galvanized the writing.
Rating:
A Widow’s Story: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco (2011), 415 pages.Joyce Carol Oates, in my experience, is a writer you either love or hate (love because of how effortlessly and incisively she maps out the terrain inside her character’s minds, or hate because of her compulsive, neurotic, nearly deranged use of the em dash, and its accompanying run-on sentences.) Both of these qualities are present in typical abundance in A Widow’s Story. I think it’s safe to say that if you love Oates, you will love this memoir, and if you find her writing style makes you want to beat your head against the wall, you will want to read it only after precautionary measures (a bicycle helmet, say) have been taken.
The Widow's Story Life Insurance
In this, her first memoir, Oates tells about the sudden, unexpected death of her beloved husband of forty-six years and the grief that subsequently consumed her. Oates has avoided the all-t0o-common pitfall for the grief memoirist—that of becoming so lost in one’s private pain that the writer forgets she is writing for a reader, and that this reader requires an actual story (as opposed to a self-absorbed three hundred page journal entry)—and has ended up with what I think is the best memoir about grief and loss I have ever read. Her ability to access all of her feelings, while at the same time maintaining an analytical distance from those feelings is a skill that sets her work apart from a long line of books I had high hopes for, but which ultimately failed in their efforts to bring me into their world.
A Widow’s Story is beautifully told, completely accessible, and not to be missed by either the memoir fan or the general reader. But, as with all of Oates’ work: Read safely, wear a helmet.
A Widow's Story Review
EXCERPT:
Of all deliveries I have come to most dread those from Harry & 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? Do they imagine that assistants shield me from the labor of dealing with such a quantity of trash? This morning I am eager to forestall another delivery of sympathy baskets for I have dragged out all the trash cans I can find in the hope that the trash will be hauled away, I have just emptied the mailbox—so stuffed, I could barely yank out its contents—and this mail I am “sorting” by way of throwing most of it into the trash can—there arrives the UPS delivery truck—another Harry & David monstrosity?—”Mrs. Smith? Sign here, please”—crying bitter tears as I open the carton—tear open the cellophane wrapper—tear at the basket cramming into the trash can packages of chocolate-covered truffles, bags of gourmet popcorn, here is a Gourmet Riviera Pear—unnaturally large, tasteless, stately as a waxen fruit in a nineteenth-century still life—here is a jar of gourmet mustard, and here a jar of gourmet olives—whoever has sent me this, I have no idea—the card is lost—the label is lost—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 bare-headed and shivering in a rage of futility accusing 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 in 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 here as if in rebuke to my raging despair is a Harry & David Miniature Rose—a delicate little rosebush that measures about five inches in height—which I think that I will keep—though, back inside the house in better lighting, pried out of its packing-case and set on the kitchen counter, the Miniature Rose appears to be already wilting, near-dead.