New York Times, February 13, 2011
A Memoir
By Joyce Carol Oates
415 pages. Ecco. $27.99
Three years ago this month Joyce Carol Oates lost Raymond J. Smith, her husband of more than 47 years, after he was hospitalized with an apparent case of pneumonia and died of a secondary infection. She has written — “unflinchingly,” as her publisher inevitably puts it — about the pain and madness that enveloped her during the year that followed.
Francois Durand/Getty Images
“On the first anniversary of her husband’s death,” Ms. Oates writes in her new memoir, “the widow should think I kept myself alive.” Her own story happens to be a bit more complicated than that, even if “A Widow’s Story” does not exactly say so. This book’s timeline includes the facts that Mr. Smith died on Feb. 18, 2008, less than a month before his 78th birthday, and that it took Ms. Oates more than a year and a half to remove his voice from their telephone answering machine. It does not say that by the time he had been dead for 11 months, Ms. Oates was happily engaged to Dr. Charles Gross, the professor of neuroscience who became her second husband in 2009.
How delicately must we tread around this situation? Ms. Oates can say (and has said, on the rare occasions when interviewers have had the nerve to ask her about it) that people whose long, sustaining marriages end often choose to remarry. Fair enough. And who would begrudge her this respite from the anguish that “A Widow’s Story” describes? But it is less fair for “A Widow’s Story” to dissemble while masquerading as a work of raw courage and honesty. A book long and rambling enough to contemplate an answering-machine recording could have found time to mention a whole new spouse.
Full review here.
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